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Seymour Hersh Bombshell: US Military Shared Intelligence With Assad In Defiance Of Obama, CIA
Back in May, Seymour Hersh upended the “official” narrative surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden and in the process created a media firestorm prompting a response from the White House.
The explosive revelations about the events that ultimately led to bin Laden’s demise came a year-and-a-half after Hersh accused the Obama administration of not telling the whole story with regard to an infamous sarin gas attack that nearly served as an excuse for airstrikes against the Assad regime in 2013.
In the six months since Hersh’s bin Laden story made international headlines, the war in Syria has escalated meaningfully. Indeed, the country is now the theatre for what amounts to World War III with the US, France, Britain, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iraq all involved either directly or indirectly.
As we noted just three days ago, we're beginning to see the formation of three alliances in the Mid-East: 1) Russia, Iran, Syria, and Iraq; 2) Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar; 3) Britain, France, and Germany. Here’s how we described the situation:
The first alliance is pro-Assad, anti-terror. The second is anti-Assad, pro-Sunni extremist. The third is anti-Assad (although less vehemently so), anti-terror (conspiracy theories aside). Note that we've left the US out. Why? Because Washington is now stuck. The US wants desperately to maintain coordination with Ankara, Riyadh, and Doha, but between stepped up media coverage of Saudi Arabia's role in underwriting extremism (via the promotion of Wahhabism) and hightened scrutiny on Erdogan's role in financing terrorists, the position is becoming increasingly untenable. But aligning solely with the UK, France, and Germany entails adopting a more conciliatory approach to Assad - just ask Berlin which, as we reported on Friday, is now working with Assad's intelligence police and may soon establish a base in Damascus.
Well, if you believe Seymour Hersh’s latest expose, we were even more right than we knew because as it turns out, some elements within the US military began tacitly cooperating with Assad two years ago after becoming concerned with Turkey and Saudi Arabia's support for Sunni extremists.
In a new 6,600 word piece, Hersh details what he says was a covert plot by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to undercut the “Assad must go” line promoted and pursued by the Obama administration and the CIA on the way to sharing valuable intelligence with the Assad government. The report also verifies the role of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and especially Turkey in arming and financing al-Nusra and ISIS.
Hersh begins by recounting a secret assessment of the security situation in Syria that dates from 2013 :
The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.
He then moves immediately to indict Ankara:
Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.
And here, according to Hersh, is how the plan was hatched:
‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.
Germany, Israel and Russia were in contact with the Syrian army, and able to exercise some influence over Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US intelligence would be shared.
Once the flow of US intelligence began, Germany, Israel and Russia started passing on information about the whereabouts and intent of radical jihadist groups to the Syrian army; in return, Syria provided information about its own capabilities and intentions. There was no direct contact between the US and the Syrian military; instead, the adviser said, ‘we provided the information – including long-range analyses on Syria’s future put together by contractors or one of our war colleges – and these countries could do with it what they chose, including sharing it with Assad. We were saying to the Germans and the others: “Here’s some information that’s pretty interesting and our interest is mutual.” End of conversation.
But the intelligence didn't come without conditions:
The Joint Chiefs let it be known that in return the US would require four things: Assad must restrain Hizbullah from attacking Israel; he must renew the stalled negotiations with Israel to reach a settlement on the Golan Heights; he must agree to accept Russian and other outside military advisers; and he must commit to holding open elections after the war with a wide range of factions included.
The Joint Chiefs then allegedly pulled a fast one on the CIA:
By the late summer of 2013, the DIA’s assessment had been circulated widely, but although many in the American intelligence community were aware that the Syrian opposition was dominated by extremists the CIA-sponsored weapons kept coming, presenting a continuing problem for Assad’s army. Gaddafi’s stockpile had created an international arms bazaar, though prices were high. ‘There was no way to stop the arms shipments that had been authorised by the president,’ the JCS adviser said. ‘The solution involved an appeal to the pocketbook. The CIA was approached by a representative from the Joint Chiefs with a suggestion: there were far less costly weapons available in Turkish arsenals that could reach the Syrian rebels within days, and without a boat ride.’ But it wasn’t only the CIA that benefited. ‘We worked with Turks we trusted who were not loyal to Erdo?an,’ the adviser said, ‘and got them to ship the jihadists in Syria all the obsolete weapons in the arsenal, including M1 carbines that hadn’t been seen since the Korean War and lots of Soviet arms. It was a message Assad could understand: “We have the power to diminish a presidential policy in its tracks.”’
Then comes yet another damning indictment of the Erdogan government:
But the Saudis were far from the only problem: American intelligence had accumulated intercept and human intelligence demonstrating that the Erdogan government had been supporting Jabhat al-Nusra for years, and was now doing the same for Islamic State. ‘We can handle the Saudis,’ the adviser said. ‘We can handle the Muslim Brotherhood. You can argue that the whole balance in the Middle East is based on a form of mutually assured destruction between Israel and the rest of the Middle East, and Turkey can disrupt the balance – which is Erdogan’s dream. We told him we wanted him to shut down the pipeline of foreign jihadists flowing into Turkey. But he is dreaming big – of restoring the Ottoman Empire – and he did not realise the extent to which he could be successful in this.’
Hersh even spoke to firebrand Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (profiled here and here):
Gabbard later told me that many of her colleagues in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, have thanked her privately for speaking out. ‘There are a lot of people in the general public, and even in the Congress, who need to have things clearly explained to them,’ Gabbard said. ‘But it’s hard when there’s so much deception about what is going on. The truth is not out.’
Ultimately, Hersh says the effort to assist Assad died with Dempsey's retirement:
The military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempsey’s retirement in September. His replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, two months before assuming office. ‘If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,’ Dunford said. ‘If you look at their behaviour, it’s nothing short of alarming.’ In October, as chairman, Dunford dismissed the Russian bombing efforts in Syria, telling the same committee that Russia ‘is not fighting’ IS. He added that America must ‘work with Turkish partners to secure the northern border of Syria’ and ‘do all we can to enable vetted Syrian opposition forces’ – i.e. the ‘moderates’ – to fight the extremists.
Obama now has a more compliant Pentagon. There will be no more indirect challenges from the military leadership to his policy of disdain for Assad and support for Erdogan. Dempsey and his associates remain mystified by Obama’s continued public defence of Erdogan, given the American intelligence community’s strong case against him – and the evidence that Obama, in private, accepts that case. ‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria,’ the president told Erdogan’s intelligence chief at a tense meeting at the White House (as I reported in the LRB of 17 April 2014). The Joint Chiefs and the DIA were constantly telling Washington’s leadership of the jihadist threat in Syria, and of Turkey’s support for it. The message was never listened to. Why not?
Read the full report below.
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“Military to Military”, Seymour M. Hersh on US intelligence sharing in the Syrian war courtesy of the London Review of Books
Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped.
The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.
Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’
‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.
Germany, Israel and Russia were in contact with the Syrian army, and able to exercise some influence over Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US intelligence would be shared. Each had its reasons for co-operating with Assad: Germany feared what might happen among its own population of six million Muslims if Islamic State expanded; Israel was concerned with border security; Russia had an alliance of very long standing with Syria, and was worried by the threat to its only naval base on the Mediterranean, at Tartus. ‘We weren’t intent on deviating from Obama’s stated policies,’ the adviser said. ‘But sharing our assessments via the military-to-military relationships with other countries could prove productive. It was clear that Assad needed better tactical intelligence and operational advice. The JCS concluded that if those needs were met, the overall fight against Islamist terrorism would be enhanced. Obama didn’t know, but Obama doesn’t know what the JCS does in every circumstance and that’s true of all presidents.’
Once the flow of US intelligence began, Germany, Israel and Russia started passing on information about the whereabouts and intent of radical jihadist groups to the Syrian army; in return, Syria provided information about its own capabilities and intentions. There was no direct contact between the US and the Syrian military; instead, the adviser said, ‘we provided the information – including long-range analyses on Syria’s future put together by contractors or one of our war colleges – and these countries could do with it what they chose, including sharing it with Assad. We were saying to the Germans and the others: “Here’s some information that’s pretty interesting and our interest is mutual.” End of conversation. The JCS could conclude that something beneficial would arise from it – but it was a military to military thing, and not some sort of a sinister Joint Chiefs’ plot to go around Obama and support Assad. It was a lot cleverer than that. If Assad remains in power, it will not be because we did it. It’s because he was smart enough to use the intelligence and sound tactical advice we provided to others.’
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The public history of relations between the US and Syria over the past few decades has been one of enmity. Assad condemned the 9/11 attacks, but opposed the Iraq War. George W. Bush repeatedly linked Syria to the three members of his ‘axis of evil’ – Iraq, Iran and North Korea – throughout his presidency. State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks show that the Bush administration tried to destabilise Syria and that these efforts continued into the Obama years. In December 2006, William Roebuck, then in charge of the US embassy in Damascus, filed an analysis of the ‘vulnerabilities’ of the Assad government and listed methods ‘that will improve the likelihood’ of opportunities for destabilisation. He recommended that Washington work with Saudi Arabia and Egypt to increase sectarian tension and focus on publicising ‘Syrian efforts against extremist groups’ – dissident Kurds and radical Sunni factions – ‘in a way that suggests weakness, signs of instability, and uncontrolled blowback’; and that the ‘isolation of Syria’ should be encouraged through US support of the National Salvation Front, led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian vice president whose government-in-exile in Riyadh was sponsored by the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood. Another 2006 cable showed that the embassy had spent $5 million financing dissidents who ran as independent candidates for the People’s Assembly; the payments were kept up even after it became clear that Syrian intelligence knew what was going on. A 2010 cable warned that funding for a London-based television network run by a Syrian opposition group would be viewed by the Syrian government ‘as a covert and hostile gesture toward the regime’.
But there is also a parallel history of shadowy co-operation between Syria and the US during the same period. The two countries collaborated against al-Qaida, their common enemy. A longtime consultant to America’s intelligence community said that, after 9/11, ‘Bashar was, for years, extremely helpful to us while, in my view, we were churlish in return, and clumsy in our use of the gold he gave us. That quiet co-operation continued among some elements, even after the [Bush administration’s] decision to vilify him.’ In 2002 Assad authorised Syrian intelligence to turn over hundreds of internal files on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Germany. Later that year, Syrian intelligence foiled an attack by al-Qaida on the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and Assad agreed to provide the CIA with the name of a vital al-Qaida informant. In violation of this agreement, the CIA contacted the informant directly; he rejected the approach, and broke off relations with his Syrian handlers. Assad also secretly turned over to the US relatives of Saddam Hussein who had sought refuge in Syria, and – like America’s allies in Jordan, Egypt, Thailand and elsewhere – tortured suspected terrorists for the CIA in a Damascus prison.
It was this history of co-operation that made it seem possible in 2013 that Damascus would agree to the new indirect intelligence-sharing arrangement with the US. The Joint Chiefs let it be known that in return the US would require four things: Assad must restrain Hizbullah from attacking Israel; he must renew the stalled negotiations with Israel to reach a settlement on the Golan Heights; he must agree to accept Russian and other outside military advisers; and he must commit to holding open elections after the war with a wide range of factions included. ‘We had positive feedback from the Israelis, who were willing to entertain the idea, but they needed to know what the reaction would be from Iran and Syria,’ the JCS adviser told me. ‘The Syrians told us that Assad would not make a decision unilaterally – he needed to have support from his military and Alawite allies. Assad’s worry was that Israel would say yes and then not uphold its end of the bargain.’ A senior adviser to the Kremlin on Middle East affairs told me that in late 2012, after suffering a series of battlefield setbacks and military defections, Assad had approached Israel via a contact in Moscow and offered to reopen the talks on the Golan Heights. The Israelis had rejected the offer. ‘They said, “Assad is finished,”’ the Russian official told me. ‘“He’s close to the end.”’ He said the Turks had told Moscow the same thing. By mid-2013, however, the Syrians believed the worst was behind them, and wanted assurances that the Americans and others were serious about their offers of help.
In the early stages of the talks, the adviser said, the Joint Chiefs tried to establish what Assad needed as a sign of their good intentions. The answer was sent through one of Assad’s friends: ‘Bring him the head of Prince Bandar.’ The Joint Chiefs did not oblige. Bandar bin Sultan had served Saudi Arabia for decades in intelligence and national security affairs, and spent more than twenty years as ambassador in Washington. In recent years, he has been known as an advocate for Assad’s removal from office by any means. Reportedly in poor health, he resigned last year as director of the Saudi National Security Council, but Saudi Arabia continues to be a major provider of funds to the Syrian opposition, estimated by US intelligence last year at $700 million.
In July 2013, the Joint Chiefs found a more direct way of demonstrating to Assad how serious they were about helping him. By then the CIA-sponsored secret flow of arms from Libya to the Syrian opposition, via Turkey, had been underway for more than a year (it started sometime after Gaddafi’s death on 20 October 2011).?? The operation was largely run out of a covert CIA annex in Benghazi, with State Department acquiescence. On 11 September 2012 the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed during an anti-American demonstration that led to the burning down of the US consulate in Benghazi; reporters for the Washington Postfound copies of the ambassador’s schedule in the building’s ruins. It showed that on 10 September Stevens had met with the chief of the CIA’s annex operation. The next day, shortly before he died, he met a representative from Al-Marfa Shipping and Maritime Services, a Tripoli-based company which, the JCS adviser said, was known by the Joint Staff to be handling the weapons shipments.
By the late summer of 2013, the DIA’s assessment had been circulated widely, but although many in the American intelligence community were aware that the Syrian opposition was dominated by extremists the CIA-sponsored weapons kept coming, presenting a continuing problem for Assad’s army. Gaddafi’s stockpile had created an international arms bazaar, though prices were high. ‘There was no way to stop the arms shipments that had been authorised by the president,’ the JCS adviser said. ‘The solution involved an appeal to the pocketbook. The CIA was approached by a representative from the Joint Chiefs with a suggestion: there were far less costly weapons available in Turkish arsenals that could reach the Syrian rebels within days, and without a boat ride.’ But it wasn’t only the CIA that benefited. ‘We worked with Turks we trusted who were not loyal to Erdo?an,’ the adviser said, ‘and got them to ship the jihadists in Syria all the obsolete weapons in the arsenal, including M1 carbines that hadn’t been seen since the Korean War and lots of Soviet arms. It was a message Assad could understand: “We have the power to diminish a presidential policy in its tracks.”’
The flow of US intelligence to the Syrian army, and the downgrading of the quality of the arms being supplied to the rebels, came at a critical juncture. The Syrian army had suffered heavy losses in the spring of 2013 in fighting against Jabhat al-Nusra and other extremist groups as it failed to hold the provincial capital of Raqqa. Sporadic Syrian army and air-force raids continued in the area for months, with little success, until it was decided to withdraw from Raqqa and other hard to defend, lightly populated areas in the north and west and focus instead on consolidating the government’s hold on Damascus and the heavily populated areas linking the capital to Latakia in the north-east. But as the army gained in strength with the Joint Chiefs’ support, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey escalated their financing and arming of Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State, which by the end of 2013 had made enormous gains on both sides of the Syria/Iraq border. The remaining non-fundamentalist rebels found themselves fighting – and losing – pitched battles against the extremists. In January 2014, IS took complete control of Raqqa and the tribal areas around it from al-Nusra and established the city as its base. Assad still controlled 80 per cent of the Syrian population, but he had lost a vast amount of territory.
CIA efforts to train the moderate rebel forces were also failing badly. ‘The CIA’s training camp was in Jordan and was controlled by a Syrian tribal group,’ the JCS adviser said. There was a suspicion that some of those who signed up for training were actually Syrian army regulars minus their uniforms. This had happened before, at the height of the Iraqi war, when hundreds of Shia militia members showed up at American training camps for new uniforms, weapons and a few days of training, and then disappeared into the desert. A separate training programme, set up by the Pentagon in Turkey, fared no better. The Pentagon acknowledged in September that only ‘four or five’ of its recruits were still battling Islamic State; a few days later 70 of them defected to Jabhat al-Nusra immediately after crossing the border into Syria.
In January 2014, despairing at the lack of progress, John Brennan, the director of the CIA, summoned American and Sunni Arab intelligence chiefs from throughout the Middle East to a secret meeting in Washington, with the aim of persuading Saudi Arabia to stop supporting extremist fighters in Syria. ‘The Saudis told us they were happy to listen,’ the JCS adviser said, ‘so everyone sat around in Washington to hear Brennan tell them that they had to get on board with the so-called moderates. His message was that if everyone in the region stopped supporting al-Nusra and Isis their ammunition and weapons would dry up, and the moderates would win out.’ Brennan’s message was ignored by the Saudis, the adviser said, who ‘went back home and increased their efforts with the extremists and asked us for more technical support. And we say OK, and so it turns out that we end up reinforcing the extremists.’
But the Saudis were far from the only problem: American intelligence had accumulated intercept and human intelligence demonstrating that the Erdo?an government had been supporting Jabhat al-Nusra for years, and was now doing the same for Islamic State. ‘We can handle the Saudis,’ the adviser said. ‘We can handle the Muslim Brotherhood. You can argue that the whole balance in the Middle East is based on a form of mutually assured destruction between Israel and the rest of the Middle East, and Turkey can disrupt the balance – which is Erdo?an’s dream. We told him we wanted him to shut down the pipeline of foreign jihadists flowing into Turkey. But he is dreaming big – of restoring the Ottoman Empire – and he did not realise the extent to which he could be successful in this.’
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One of the constants in US affairs since the fall of the Soviet Union has been a military-to-military relationship with Russia. After 1991 the US spent billions of dollars to help Russia secure its nuclear weapons complex, including a highly secret joint operation to remove weapons-grade uranium from unsecured storage depots in Kazakhstan. Joint programmes to monitor the security of weapons-grade materials continued for the next two decades. During the American war on Afghanistan, Russia provided overflight rights for US cargo carriers and tankers, as well as access for the flow of weapons, ammunition, food and water the US war machine needed daily. Russia’s military provided intelligence on Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts and helped the US negotiate rights to use an airbase in Kyrgyzstan. The Joint Chiefs have been in communication with their Russian counterparts throughout the Syrian war, and the ties between the two militaries start at the top. In August, a few weeks before his retirement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dempsey made a farewell visit to the headquarters of the Irish Defence Forces in Dublin and told his audience there that he had made a point while in office to keep in touch with the chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov. ‘I’ve actually suggested to him that we not end our careers as we began them,’ Dempsey said – one a tank commander in West Germany, the other in the east.
When it comes to tackling Islamic State, Russia and the US have much to offer each other. Many in the IS leadership and rank and file fought for more than a decade against Russia in the two Chechen wars that began in 1994, and the Putin government is heavily invested in combating Islamist terrorism. ‘Russia knows the Isis leadership,’ the JCS adviser said, ‘and has insights into its operational techniques, and has much intelligence to share.’ In return, he said, ‘we’ve got excellent trainers with years of experience in training foreign fighters – experience that Russia does not have.’ The adviser would not discuss what American intelligence is also believed to have: an ability to obtain targeting data, often by paying huge sums of cash, from sources within rebel militias.
A former White House adviser on Russian affairs told me that before 9/11 Putin ‘used to say to us: “We have the same nightmares about different places.” He was referring to his problems with the caliphate in Chechnya and our early issues with al-Qaida. These days, after the Metrojet bombing over Sinai and the massacres in Paris and elsewhere, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we actually have the same nightmares about the same places.’
Yet the Obama administration continues to condemn Russia for its support of Assad. A retired senior diplomat who served at the US embassy in Moscow expressed sympathy for Obama’s dilemma as the leader of the Western coalition opposed to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine: ‘Ukraine is a serious issue and Obama has been handling it firmly with sanctions. But our policy vis-à-vis Russia is too often unfocused. But it’s not about us in Syria. It’s about making sure Bashar does not lose. The reality is that Putin does not want to see the chaos in Syria spread to Jordan or Lebanon, as it has to Iraq, and he does not want to see Syria end up in the hands of Isis. The most counterproductive thing Obama has done, and it has hurt our efforts to end the fighting a lot, was to say: “Assad must go as a premise for negotiation.”’ He also echoed a view held by some in the Pentagon when he alluded to a collateral factor behind Russia’s decision to launch airstrikes in support of the Syrian army on 30 September: Putin’s desire to prevent Assad from suffering the same fate as Gaddafi. He had been told that Putin had watched a video of Gaddafi’s savage death three times, a video that shows him being sodomised with a bayonet. The JCS adviser also told me of a US intelligence assessment which concluded that Putin had been appalled by Gaddafi’s fate: ‘Putin blamed himself for letting Gaddafi go, for not playing a strong role behind the scenes’ at the UN when the Western coalition was lobbying to be allowed to undertake the airstrikes that destroyed the regime. ‘Putin believed that unless he got engaged Bashar would suffer the same fate – mutilated – and he’d see the destruction of his allies in Syria.’
In a speech on 22 November, Obama declared that the ‘principal targets’ of the Russian airstrikes ‘have been the moderate opposition’. It’s a line that the administration – along with most of the mainstream American media – has rarely strayed from. The Russians insist that they are targeting all rebel groups that threaten Syria’s stability – including Islamic State. The Kremlin adviser on the Middle East explained in an interview that the first round of Russian airstrikes was aimed at bolstering security around a Russian airbase in Latakia, an Alawite stronghold. The strategic goal, he said, has been to establish a jihadist-free corridor from Damascus to Latakia and the Russian naval base at Tartus and then to shift the focus of bombing gradually to the south and east, with a greater concentration of bombing missions over IS-held territory. Russian strikes on IS targets in and near Raqqa were reported as early as the beginning of October; in November there were further strikes on IS positions near the historic city of Palmyra and in Idlib province, a bitterly contested stronghold on the Turkish border.
Russian incursions into Turkish airspace began soon after Putin authorised the bombings, and the Russian air force deployed electronic jamming systems that interfered with Turkish radar. The message being sent to the Turkish air force, the JCS adviser said, was: ‘We’re going to fly our fighter planes where we want and when we want and jam your radar. Do not fuck with us. Putin was letting the Turks know what they were up against.’ Russia’s aggression led to Turkish complaints and Russian denials, along with more aggressive border patrolling by the Turkish air force. There were no significant incidents until 24 November, when two Turkish F-16 fighters, apparently acting under more aggressive rules of engagement, shot down a Russian Su-24M jet that had crossed into Turkish airspace for no more than 17 seconds. In the days after the fighter was shot down, Obama expressed support for Erdo?an, and after they met in private on 1 December he told a press conference that his administration remained ‘very much committed to Turkey’s security and its sovereignty’. He said that as long as Russia remained allied with Assad, ‘a lot of Russian resources are still going to be targeted at opposition groups … that we support … So I don’t think we should be under any illusions that somehow Russia starts hitting only Isil targets. That’s not happening now. It was never happening. It’s not going to be happening in the next several weeks.’
The Kremlin adviser on the Middle East, like the Joint Chiefs and the DIA, dismisses the ‘moderates’ who have Obama’s support, seeing them as extremist Islamist groups that fight alongside Jabhat al-Nusra and IS (‘There’s no need to play with words and split terrorists into moderate and not moderate,’ Putin said in a speech on 22 October). The American generals see them as exhausted militias that have been forced to make an accommodation with Jabhat al-Nusra or IS in order to survive. At the end of 2014, Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German journalist who was allowed to spend ten days touring IS-held territory in Iraq and Syria, told CNN that the IS leadership ‘are all laughing about the Free Syrian Army. They don’t take them for serious. They say: “The best arms sellers we have are the FSA. If they get a good weapon, they sell it to us.” They didn’t take them for serious. They take for serious Assad. They take for serious, of course, the bombs. But they fear nothing, and FSA doesn’t play a role.’
*
Putin’s bombing campaign provoked a series of anti-Russia articles in the American press. On 25 October, the New York Times reported, citing Obama administration officials, that Russian submarines and spy ships were ‘aggressively’ operating near the undersea cables that carry much of the world’s internet traffic – although, as the article went on to acknowledge, there was ‘no evidence yet’ of any Russian attempt actually to interfere with that traffic. Ten days earlier the Times published a summary of Russian intrusions into its former Soviet satellite republics, and described the Russian bombing in Syria as being ‘in some respects a return to the ambitious military moves of the Soviet past’. The report did not note that the Assad administration had invited Russia to intervene, nor did it mention the US bombing raids inside Syria that had been underway since the previous September, without Syria’s approval. An October op-ed in the same paper by Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Russia between 2012 and 2014, declared that the Russian air campaign was attacking ‘everyone except the Islamic State’. The anti-Russia stories did not abate after the Metrojet disaster, for which Islamic State claimed credit. Few in the US government and media questioned why IS would target a Russian airliner, along with its 224 passengers and crew, if Moscow’s air force was attacking only the Syrian ‘moderates’.
Economic sanctions, meanwhile, are still in effect against Russia for what a large number of Americans consider Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine, as are US Treasury Department sanctions against Syria and against those Americans who do business there. The New York Times, in a report on sanctions in late November, revived an old and groundless assertion, saying that the Treasury’s actions ‘emphasise an argument that the administration has increasingly been making about Mr Assad as it seeks to press Russia to abandon its backing for him: that although he professes to be at war with Islamist terrorists, he has a symbiotic relationship with the Islamic State that has allowed it to thrive while he has clung to power.’
*
The four core elements of Obama’s Syria policy remain intact today: an insistence that Assad must go; that no anti-IS coalition with Russia is possible; that Turkey is a steadfast ally in the war against terrorism; and that there really are significant moderate opposition forces for the US to support. The Paris attacks on 13 November that killed 130 people did not change the White House’s public stance, although many European leaders, including François Hollande, advocated greater co-operation with Russia and agreed to co-ordinate more closely with its air force; there was also talk of the need to be more flexible about the timing of Assad’s exit from power. On 24 November, Hollande flew to Washington to discuss how France and the US could collaborate more closely in the fight against Islamic State. At a joint press conference at the White House, Obama said he and Hollande had agreed that ‘Russia’s strikes against the moderate opposition only bolster the Assad regime, whose brutality has helped to fuel the rise’ of IS. Hollande didn’t go that far but he said that the diplomatic process in Vienna would ‘lead to Bashar al-Assad’s departure … a government of unity is required.’ The press conference failed to deal with the far more urgent impasse between the two men on the matter of Erdo?an. Obama defended Turkey’s right to defend its borders; Hollande said it was ‘a matter of urgency’ for Turkey to take action against terrorists. The JCS adviser told me that one of Hollande’s main goals in flying to Washington had been to try to persuade Obama to join the EU in a mutual declaration of war against Islamic State. Obama said no. The Europeans had pointedly not gone to Nato, to which Turkey belongs, for such a declaration. ‘Turkey is the problem,’ the JCS adviser said.
Assad, naturally, doesn’t accept that a group of foreign leaders should be deciding on his future. Imad Moustapha, now Syria’s ambassador to China, was dean of the IT faculty at the University of Damascus, and a close aide of Assad’s, when he was appointed in 2004 as the Syrian ambassador to the US, a post he held for seven years. Moustapha is known still to be close to Assad, and can be trusted to reflect what he thinks. He told me that for Assad to surrender power would mean capitulating to ‘armed terrorist groups’ and that ministers in a national unity government – such as was being proposed by the Europeans – would be seen to be beholden to the foreign powers that appointed them. These powers could remind the new president ‘that they could easily replace him as they did before to the predecessor … Assad owes it to his people: he could not leave because the historic enemies of Syria are demanding his departure.’
*
Moustapha also brought up China, an ally of Assad that has allegedly committed more than $30 billion to postwar reconstruction in Syria. China, too, is worried about Islamic State. ‘China regards the Syrian crisis from three perspectives,’ he said: international law and legitimacy; global strategic positioning; and the activities of jihadist Uighurs, from Xinjiang province in China’s far west. Xinjiang borders eight nations – Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India – and, in China’s view, serves as a funnel for terrorism around the world and within China. Many Uighur fighters now in Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – an often violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish intelligence to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence,’ Moustapha said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service with information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on travelling into Syria.’
Moustapha’s concerns were echoed by a Washington foreign affairs analyst who has closely followed the passage of jihadists through Turkey and into Syria. The analyst, whose views are routinely sought by senior government officials, told me that ‘Erdo?an has been bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his government has been agitating in favour of their struggle in China. Uighur and Burmese Muslim terrorists who escape into Thailand somehow get Turkish passports and are then flown to Turkey for transit into Syria.’ He added that there was also what amounted to another ‘rat line’ that was funnelling Uighurs – estimates range from a few hundred to many thousands over the years – from China into Kazakhstan for eventual relay to Turkey, and then to IS territory in Syria. ‘US intelligence,’ he said, ‘is not getting good information about these activities because those insiders who are unhappy with the policy are not talking to them.’ He also said it was ‘not clear’ that the officials responsible for Syrian policy in the State Department and White House ‘get it’. IHS-Jane’s Defence Weekly estimated in October that as many as five thousand Uighur would-be fighters have arrived in Turkey since 2013, with perhaps two thousand moving on to Syria. Moustapha said he has information that ‘up to 860 Uighur fighters are currently in Syria.’
China’s growing concern about the Uighur problem and its link to Syria and Islamic State have preoccupied Christina Lin, a scholar who dealt with Chinese issues a decade ago while serving in the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld. ‘I grew up in Taiwan and came to the Pentagon as a critic of China,’ Lin told me. ‘I used to demonise the Chinese as ideologues, and they are not perfect. But over the years as I see them opening up and evolving, I have begun to change my perspective. I see China as a potential partner for various global challenges especially in the Middle East. There are many places – Syria for one – where the United States and China must co-operate in regional security and counterterrorism.’ A few weeks earlier, she said, China and India, Cold War enemies that ‘hated each other more than China and the United States hated each other, conducted a series of joint counterterrorism exercises. And today China and Russia both want to co-operate on terrorism issues with the United States.’ As China sees it, Lin suggests, Uighur militants who have made their way to Syria are being trained by Islamic State in survival techniques intended to aid them on covert return trips to the Chinese mainland, for future terrorist attacks there. ‘If Assad fails,’ Lin wrote in a paper published in September, ‘jihadi fighters from Russia’s Chechnya, China’s Xinjiang and India’s Kashmir will then turn their eyes towards the home front to continue jihad, supported by a new and well-sourced Syrian operating base in the heart of the Middle East.’
*
General Dempsey and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept their dissent out of bureaucratic channels, and survived in office. General Michael Flynn did not. ‘Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria,’ said Patrick Lang, a retired army colonel who served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the DIA. ‘He thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out. He wouldn’t shut up.’ Flynn told me his problems went beyond Syria. ‘I was shaking things up at the DIA – and not just moving deckchairs on the Titanic. It was radical reform. I felt that the civilian leadership did not want to hear the truth. I suffered for it, but I’m OK with that.’ In a recent interview in Der Spiegel, Flynn was blunt about Russia’s entry into the Syrian war: ‘We have to work constructively with Russia. Whether we like it or not, Russia made a decision to be there and to act militarily. They are there, and this has dramatically changed the dynamic. So you can’t say Russia is bad; they have to go home. It’s not going to happen. Get real.’
Few in the US Congress share this view. One exception is Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii and member of the House Armed Services Committee who, as a major in the Army National Guard, served two tours in the Middle East. In an interview on CNN in October she said: ‘The US and the CIA should stop this illegal and counterproductive war to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad and should stay focused on fighting against … the Islamic extremist groups.’
‘Does it not concern you,’ the interviewer asked, ‘that Assad’s regime has been brutal, killing at least 200,000 and maybe 300,000 of his own people?’
‘The things that are being said about Assad right now,’ Gabbard responded, ‘are the same that were said about Gaddafi, they are the same things that were said about Saddam Hussein by those who were advocating for the US to … overthrow those regimes … If it happens here in Syria … we will end up in a situation with far greater suffering, with far greater persecution of religious minorities and Christians in Syria, and our enemy will be far stronger.’
‘So what you are saying,’ the interviewer asked, ‘is that the Russian military involvement in the air and on-the-ground Iranian involvement – they are actually doing the US a favour?’
‘They are working toward defeating our common enemy,’ Gabbard replied.
Gabbard later told me that many of her colleagues in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, have thanked her privately for speaking out. ‘There are a lot of people in the general public, and even in the Congress, who need to have things clearly explained to them,’ Gabbard said. ‘But it’s hard when there’s so much deception about what is going on. The truth is not out.’ It’s unusual for a politician to challenge her party’s foreign policy directly and on the record. For someone on the inside, with access to the most secret intelligence, speaking openly and critically can be a career-ender. Informed dissent can be transmitted by means of a trust relationship between a reporter and those on the inside, but it almost invariably includes no signature. The dissent exists, however. The longtime consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command could not hide his contempt when I asked him for his view of the US’s Syria policy. ‘The solution in Syria is right before our nose,’ he said. ‘Our primary threat is Isis and all of us – the United States, Russia and China – need to work together. Bashar will remain in office and, after the country is stabilised there will be an election. There is no other option.’
The military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempsey’s retirement in September. His replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, two months before assuming office. ‘If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,’ Dunford said. ‘If you look at their behaviour, it’s nothing short of alarming.’ In October, as chairman, Dunford dismissed the Russian bombing efforts in Syria, telling the same committee that Russia ‘is not fighting’ IS. He added that America must ‘work with Turkish partners to secure the northern border of Syria’ and ‘do all we can to enable vetted Syrian opposition forces’ – i.e. the ‘moderates’ – to fight the extremists.
Obama now has a more compliant Pentagon. There will be no more indirect challenges from the military leadership to his policy of disdain for Assad and support for Erdo?an. Dempsey and his associates remain mystified by Obama’s continued public defence of Erdo?an, given the American intelligence community’s strong case against him – and the evidence that Obama, in private, accepts that case. ‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria,’ the president told Erdo?an’s intelligence chief at a tense meeting at the White House (as I reported in the LRB of 17 April 2014). The Joint Chiefs and the DIA were constantly telling Washington’s leadership of the jihadist threat in Syria, and of Turkey’s support for it. The message was never listened to. Why not?
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Yep, chaps my ass too.
I'm not eating Dinky Di
Not yet.
We're already overstocked on chaps who are asses. Losing some won't be a particularly bad thing.
I don't think that I've ever seen a pair of chaps that wasn't assless.
Anywho, I'm going to start an AR-10 build here very soon. I'm going to be going with .260 Rem so that I can really reach out and touch someone. Nosler just came out with a new super high BC bonded bullet that should still be super sonic at 2000yds at my altitude.
Competition serves as a necessary balance. In any large organization, fanatical unanimity tends to lead to destabilization and implosion. In an organization as large as the Leviathan, it would cause the earth to spin off into space, overpowering even the gravitational pull of that huge fiery ball in the center of the solar system. Bizarro world would be where mere mortal humans actually coordinate and execute the impossible grand conspiracy some ascribe to certain cliques.
Compartmentalization is a key, but it is not the key.
Even with an accurate map of the Imperial fiefdoms- each fiefdom has own Official and Unofficial motivations, and competing interests with other fiefs, as well as ever-changing personnel with distinctly different "friends and family" lists maintained by Verizon.
Compartmentalization too often misleads the limited minded to a conclusion that there must be some red phone with a direct line between the vampire tomb of John D Rockefeller and the White House. Poor Theseus finds himself at the dead end of personalization, while Daedalus succeeds in re-writing history.
Truth, however, is timeless.
Love it baby! And where can I git me one of them leviathan thingies? Do you really need a key, or can it be hotwired?
Amazing bullshit.
Do you write copy for a deecee publication?
No, but I am still on a first name basis with many of the GODS you fear and cower before. They are both human and fallible, and their conspiracies are, beyond creating blowback and unintended if often foreseen consequences, not always profitable, much like when mere mortals or their algorithms try to pick winning stocks in a market they themselves openly manipulate and nominally control.
Since man was living in caves long before the Old Testament was written, they have ascribed names to demons and fears in juvenile attempts to exert control over those fears. The world doesn't work that way, it is a complex system, and its dynamics have evolved around immortal institutions as opposed to mortal and systematically replaced individuals.
Were any of those people you know portrayed in that movie Cabin in the Woods?
entropy always grows beyond prediction.
One maybe needs to take a second look at this "warmongering Neo Con" narrative...if the JCS have been trying to hold back from doing the "wrong thing" as per Obama's wishes then maybe there is more to this below the surface.
Whoever said it a few comments back, that they are pursuing different goals, is bang on! There is the primary reason the whole Obama Administration looks like a Monkey fucking a football! How many more branches of government is this kind shit going on in?!
Russia is going to "win" this thing...Obama is just not a strong enough leader. Trump wouldn't be dicking around here, he would be happy to stand back and let the Russians risk their personnel. There is more in it for them anyways!
Trump/Gowdy 2016 and let them sort this out. ;)
Obama is just not a strong enough leader ...
Is the goal to be a certain kind of leader, or to get things done? If the goal is to get things done, then you do whatever it takes. Being a strong leader is less important than having an ability to manipulate/influence people and events into getting done what you want done.
That is, there is more than one way to be a "strong" leader. If you end up getting done what you want done, you are an effective leader - which is all that counts. Nevermind whether you looked "strong" to your audience.
Syria and all that goes with it is on Russia's continent, not ours. Why should the U.S. be doing what Russia and others should be doing to clean up their own back yard? You will probably not ever know what role the POTUS and his minions played in getting Russia to take care of the Syrian events - events happening on Russia's continent, not ours.
Some folks only care about image management, and behave in ways they think enhances that. Others care more about making things happen, and don't give a fig what their "image" looks like while they are doing that.
Gowdy? HE is a neocon sell out puppet. Lindsey Graham and some of the worst shit in the world control the SC GOP-e. Gowdy is a Lindsey Graham puppet. What kind of state puts a flaming h**ose*ual neoCon in charge of the state party?
SC where dumb white southerners cheer on Trayvon thugs and rapists playin ball like little white girl cheerleaders. Pathetic.
The US military has been going around Obama for quite a while. I have given examples before. That bothers me and it should bother you too.
Wrong as usual, you reprehensible twat.
What bothers me is they have to because the Ziopuppet in Chief and the cia keep arming and supporting terrorists as a proxy force to destroy Syria and Iraq. On top of continuing to provoke Ivan [Ukraine hasnt been on ZH or in the news but has been very active].
Just as the Ziofascist pigs have long wanted.
Great links. Thanks.
The Voltaire net article is the kind that ZH should publish, but won't for some reason.
The neo-con Zios seem pretty inept, to be in charge of the cabal at the root of all the world's evil. Viz from the Voltairnet article:
The recommendations to the Israeli government to sabotage the peace process in Palestine are presented by the authors of Clean Break as part of a larger plan to allow Israel to “shape its strategic environment”, by “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq”, weakening Syria and Lebanon, and finally Iran.
If true, they're ignoramouses when it comes to playing balance-of-power politics in their own favor. Israel was doing much better when Iraq served as a counterweight to Iran.
Now Iraq has joined Iran, Hezboallah and Assad, who are presently backed by the second most powerful military in the world, Russia's. And the country who's #1, the U.S., with Obongo in charge of furthering the neo-con Zios' cause, has managed to make itself a non-factor, except as supplier of used pickup trucks and whatnot, via Turkey, to the worst of the worst of the Sunni fanatics.
Machiavellian, right. With Machiavelli on stupid pills.
Good job!
You should read it more closely. That not all consequences can be accounted for by amateurish zealots is no reason to think that said zealots didnt, largely, create the very state violence and regime change ops the us has engaged in.
Read on, clever boy.
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=western_support_for_islam...
http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/lie-factory
Having power doesnt necessarily mean knowing what you are doing. In fact, and re the second link, that dual citizen non experts were ALLOWED to set up their own Likudnik intel lie factory within the Pentagon, because cia was not giving them the pretext they wanted, should indicate to you the absurd power the Zionists do have and have had.
No hyperbole about 'the joos' needed.
And the notion iran or hezbollah are existential threats to israel is absurd. The reverse is true.
http://youtu.be/QphxGBXiA-M
Frankly, I'd be more disturbed if the military wasn't going around Obama. Obama knew the military would oppose him; that's why he's been doing a soft purge of the military leadership since his first day in office. Now, as Obama's final year in office approaches, we will see if there are any remaining elements of military leadership that are still loyal to the Constitution in preference to the Resident of the Oval Office.
Duh! Wars that end have finite profits.
wise is the man(or men) who know the limitations backing them up,and decide it's better to live.
Hirohito moment when Obama went to the pentagon for the 7 min pressed. A real prez would have had that in the Oval Office
noted this in a link to the moon of alabama yesterday {not to take credit for either zh here or for the moon...}
But note today's moon..
http://www.moonofalabama.org/
guys you post so fast your nonsense comments i assume you didnt even read the article above
(i congratulate you on at least reading the title)
Hersh has rolled over for the Zionists - Considering the Jews control 96% of the media - information doesn't get 'out' accidentally - This 'leak' was intended and designed to deflect the attention away from the fact that the ZIONIST/US CREATED ISIS and ALL the other 'terror' groups around the globe !
Where do I find this other 4%?
You've found it. Sie haben es gefunded, Herr Doktor.
If you work through the Comments, you will find some links to news sites that are real gems.
With enough such sites, you can get a realistic picture of what's going on. Admittedly this is too much work for 95% of the population.
It'll be down to 3% by the time the ones who agree with you on this are rounded up & kicked off of ZH (& their comments deleted).
If you want to be in a yet smaller minority, call out Trump as globalist loving fuckwit. Just like this clown Seymor Hersch. Paid to follow a script. Free to improvise as long as they don't stray too far from the central message they are tasked with pushing onto the public.
To winnow it down further and join an even smaller club, ask how the Jews could possibly control the world for the past two thousand years when the country of Israel was destroyed 70 years after Christ? The facade of a country known as Israel today didn't exist during the Dark Ages and the Inquisition. You know the Inquisition, when those who denied the pope was the supreme ruler were put to death.
I question why Jews are to blame for most evil conspiracies in the world today but somehow the "Holy" Roman Empire, of yesteryear and today, receives a pass?
It all ends when the various legions all march back to Rome.
No worries. Obama is launching his New Career as a comedian. And his first Gig is on the Jerry Seinfeld show.
Obama to Appear on Jerry Seinfeld’s ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/21/obama-to-appear-o...
Barrack Hussein Obama, Sunni Muslim, Indonesian citizen, Muslim Brotherhood member and President of the United States of America, wants ISIS to take control of Syria, increasing the geographic extent and power of the Caliphate.
While pretending to do the bidding of the Neocons, so they won't turf his butt?
m1 carbine?? they wanted them to lose the war? never saw any in videos from syria
i love that rifle!
pretty , but useless
i always liked it because i have short arms and it fit to the trigger perfectly when i was a kid. i've plinked hundreds of cans and bottles with it and a few racoons and skunks. i always thought i could shoot ducks with it but never got the chance.
Captured Daesh Fighter Reveals Details of Turkey’s Ties With Terror Group
http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20151222/1032169144/daesh-group-member...
This situation is similar to the end of the Reagan administration but without an anti-interventionist US left or a coherent print media.
Conspiracy Theorist are saying that all the Boys and Girls at the top of Global Leadership/Rulership have bought into New Gloablist Corproate Feudal System....RT.com is starting to sound like BBCNN/Faux News
RT.com has taken on a definite Zionist 'Liberal' slant...completely against how real Russians see their World.
The US Military sharing Intel with Assad?... and just happened to be leaked to lucky Seymour Hersh...?
LOL!
If the US Military was sharing Intel with Assad....that means they were sharing intel with Putin and the Russians...?
That borders on treason, given how the Western Corporate Media is still Portraying their Russian enemy to their listening Herds.
Remember this Intel sharing happened while the US Military and its political Spokesfolk put Putin, and the Russians, Ahead of their ISIS brand as the US's number one threat to 'National' Security....down arrow away!
Treason is as treason does.....check out the monkey in the Whitehouse.
The US Military was not sharing Intel with Assad. It was sharing Intel with those that shared Intel with Assad. Plausible deniability.
Definitely not with Israel. There is nothing to gain but much to lose for Israel to share intelligence with anyone, especially Syria when Israel is profiting from ISIS oil. So take the story with a few grains of salt.
viafriak, I am glad I am not the only one that noticed about RT.com
Damn red pill.
Can't watch teevee.
Can't trust any news.
WTF!
RT does not have the freedom to do whatever they want. RT has to tone it down or get kicked out. They just overcame such a threat in the UK. If they get kicked out of every Zino-contolled country, they will have lost their audience and won't be doing anybody much good.
Flynn and Dempsey should be charged with treason STAT! - Oblamer....
Disfunctional.
Anything more required?
I'm sure the report on Syria's future by a US war college would have had Assad and the Russkies rolling about laughing their socks off.
Somebody tired of it already?
Obama can't get out of the Presidency fast enough!
He is a TOTAL FUCKING DISASTER!!
And you think that's going to change why???
Wake me up when the military arrests everyone in Langley, Wolfowitz all the New American Century traitors, Neuland, Soros, Burzinski, CONgress critters, the head of DIA, the head and virtually all agents of DHS, the MERC units, the death squad units... etc. etc.
Yep. That pretty much sums it up Sgt.
+ 1 Sarge!
Seemore Hearsts should cease his endless prattle and try to condense his 3000 word scribbling me into three sentances, that actually have some facts. His scripted propaganda, only goes to show that there is actually, a huge schism, amongst TPTB.
Last time I checked this is not how the military works. So Hersh is implicating the Joint Chiefs and the CIA in a secret conspiracy to oppose the orders of the commander in chief?
1) Russia, Iran, Syria, and Iraq; 2) Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar; 3) Britain, France, and Germany. Here’s how we described the situation:
The first alliance is pro-Assad, anti-terror.
Umm.....No. This article has no credibility based on that single comment. That group is anti-terror? Sorry, not buying it.
Who ever it was that shared intelligence with Assad, in my book, deserves a medal. Maybe that same courageous faction could take care of "business" in the White House, i.e. cut out the cancer.
sounds like the military doesn't like the zionazi policy. do generals frag other generals?
we're beginning to see the formation of three alliances in the Mid-East: 1) Russia, Iran, Syria, and Iraq; 2) Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar; 3) Britain, France, and Germany...
I wonder which alliance(s) Israel is supporting and/or undermining? (Sarc)
See, this is the kind of foolishness that Trump can sort out. He's a no-nonsense man - not perfect by any stretch, but he s aware of what a US President can do and can't do. And here's the thing... He is NOT running for the office of Emperor of the World; he is actually running for President of the USA. He's the only candidate (except maybe Bernie Sanders) who is a genuine patriot.
http://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2015/12/trump-president-or-emperor.html
There are different factions in the US government that oppose each other? Yep. Maybe it's because the US State Department is out of control. Just like how Hillary was running guns in Libya to al Qaeda. Why didn't the US military bail the ambassador out? Because fuck them. The military knew what they were doing.
GOOD. Both the CIA and Obama are traitors! The military is our last hope to restore the republic. That is why Obama is trying so hard to disarm Vetrans.
?complete lack of logic?
Do we not claim to have a civilian government, with a subordinate military? A world with multiple military powers in one political entity will not likely have a quiet end.
That is why we should be opposing the CIA, they are producer of violence under the personal control of the President, no chain of command needed.
And he has a complete Israeli Mossad group at his beck and call, it appears.
We can hope for the military to save us, but really, history says we should do it ourselves and keep them strictly in the barracks when it comes to politics.
We are waiting to replace the government. I say vote Clinton, the motivation will be stronger.
Trump is certainly different, but better? Hopium again.
The CYA is made up of Globalist types, with moral relativism that's calibrated to the Agenda of TPTB. Their loyalty is mostly centered on their egos and managing their careers. Hi-End Mercs, fighting mostly the wrong enemies, i.e., they fight the enemies of the 0.1%, rather than the enemies of the 99%.
To the three suites of alliances cited at the beginning of the story, a fourth needs to be added: US and Israel.
Isn't it interesting that two out of the four conditions for DIA's covert support for Syria had to do with helping Israel (restraining Hizbollah and settling on Golan Heights)?
I've always wondered how the violence has somehow not spread into Israel, and now I think we know.
Hillary may be the last pol around still campaigning to overthrow Assad. I never did understand why she thought she had a strong enough hand for that rather outlandish gambit.
Hillary's side probably owns the voting machines.
That reads like something out of a novel... If it's all true it gives me some heart that there are still a few good people left in positions of power. Paul Ryan has so much to work with for drafting articles of impeachment against Obama, if he can't impeach this guy then he can't impeach anyone and we should stop pretending this is still a Republican form of government. The Republicans have the votes to pass articles, but would probably not get the 2/3 needed in the Senate, because the Democrats are criminal almost to a man. So maybe it's a futile gesture, but at least would tarnish this scumbag for the history books.
Pssst, they're all Criminal Frauds who represent a Criminal entity called the UNITED STATES. CORP. INC.
Very few.
Out of the very many retired military and intelligence people, how many have signed a 9/11 petition?
Of all of America's LEOs, retired on wonderful pensions, how many have signed a 9/11 petition?
Surely there are retired MSM. How many?
I don't think we can count on anyone in the Status Quo. Our leaders and junior leaders have all, 100%, failed to notice 9/11 FF.
Trump too.
If we said end of the year was the deadline, sign a 9/11 petition by Midnight end of the year or be disqualified for any leadership in the US, we would at least know who was who.
I am collecting a list of push-backs. Ideas welcome.
"Intelligence" Well, its a start.
My left nut is vetted more than a Seymour Hersh piece.
Stick to HFT scandals guys.
seymour has a better track record than your either of your cockled nuts. that's the proper way to keep score.
‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic.’
Are we talking about the same American public I know??
The American public are idiots brainwashed by Facebook, TV, Hollywood et al. Morons all worked up about Star Wars or their Trayvon thug ballplayer heroes.
White American males are pretty pathetic and the women are easily manipulated.
And if you think there are any "good" guys fighting for us anywhere in the US govt - keep dreaming. This is all disinformation to give you hope that this evil corrupt mess can be saved. There are no good guys.
So we get a glimpse of how fucked up it is, and we know deep down inside, it's a lot lot worse.
people are over there dyeing for this convoluted crap, but boy are we selling bombs and ammo.
Swords into plowshares, what a strange concept. who would every want to help everybody on the planet get along.
so is it true to get your General's stars you have to stick your dick in a dead pigs head..?
Read the Benghazi reports. I don't believe they recount a single competent act. The ambassador was turning down military offers of more protection at the same time as his pleas to washington were not being forwarded via Tripoli and, if they got there, got stuck in the inbox of someone who was trying to get him to use local talent, no doubt kickbacks involved.
Entirely negative-sum, no sabotage is needed to reduce their effectiveness to negative values, they do just fine on their own.
That, plus eat a BLT, pickled pork hocks, shellfish, eat bacon - smeared pussy, pray to Jesus, make fun of non-Christian entities of religious adoration, and be uncircumcised. For obvious reasons of avoiding infiltration. It's what I'd do.
No, it's far worse, you need a nod from congress.
....Why Not?
Because Obama is a fucking Jihadi head chopper lover.
I read it as more of a DoD/Pentagon vs WH/CIA schism. DoD shares Intel to prevent possible destabilizing of region as stated in the 08 RAND Corp report.
DoD doesn't want Syria quagmire (maybe more focused on Ukraine), meanwhile CIA and Obama keep pushing Syria.
Biggest piece to me was the confirmation of the Benghazi gun running by the CIA.
Its all right there if his info is good...that should blow the lid off the whole thing.
"Biggest piece to me was the confirmation of the Benghazi gun running by the CIA."
So, then why hasn't that Criminal Cunt Killary been arrested and instead running for CEO of the highest office? Because, it's a Criminal System, run by Criminals & owned by Criminals.
Only in Amerika, The USSA.
That info has been available since the whole Benghazi thing was investigated the first time.
We have known about the CIA providing arms to ISIS via their supposed FSA forever, and the news never makes political waves. Mild embarassment at best.
The government is corrupt to the core, it is best considered a criminal conspiracy against the American people.
If we had been taught that that was the essential nature of government from our nursery rhymes, we might not be in the mess we are in. But it isn't too late to start.
Information overload ( head explosion)
Yes this a complex situation, but the ineptitude of this administration is nothing short of astonishing.
I think you're being polite in saying the admin is inept, not misguided.
Fucking Criminal is what it is. Get it right.
Like to believe Seymour on this one but I don't have that much faith in the U.S. military for intellect or courage.
And in light of the damage they single handidly orchestrated in the destruction of Iraq based on the ultimate lie of all lies that they knew was a lie to use a Hitleryism "what difference does it make"?... You forgot to include in #2 Israel who obviously is the Maestro in all of it and it's second in command "ass puppet" Uncle Sam!
Sorry Seymour. But you've sold propoganda to us before and if it's a way to prop up a pill laden drugged out bunch of fucking losers in camo that take pictures of their raping, torture and murders for fun... Ain't gonna cut it whether it's true or not true because too much damage to God, Country and uniform has already been done based on the ultimate sacrafice 14 years ago!
Anything on the ground that speaks English whether in military uniform or wearing a towel should be shot to death!!! Too many innocent lives murdered and too much irreparable damage to the reputation and integirty, to the U.S. military was sown 12 years ago when we invaded Iraq!
P.S.
Seymour....
Next you'll be telling us that a special unit within the U.S. military has been secretly aiding the Ukrainian resistance in Donbass?...
If the boyz and girlz in uniform are so "gung ho" to oppose there Commander-in-Chief for the treason both he and them have committed then fucking leave the Middle East completely alone that you destroyed and bring your "toys" home to finish the job on your own leaders in Washington and then yourselves for what you've done!!!
Worth repeating:
"bring your "toys" home to finish the job on your own leaders in Washington and then yourselves for what you've done!!!"
Bombshell? It's pretty obvious about now that the US corporate Government has NO cohesive foreign policy "plan"...it's a group of paramilitary gangs with high tech kit just there to roll over sovereign nations and set up business deals for the .01% back home
Gangs with mostly competing agendas. Fer fucks sake, how many "Air Forces" do we have? Anyone who has not seen this in the last 40+ years is completely blind.
King O, like all Presidents is allowed to fuck around inside the USA, to reshape it or generally fuck it over as they see fit. Outside these borders the President doesn’t do shit. Outside these borders the Banksterz, corporate oligarchs and MIC tell him what the plan is. It's like having a dozen foot ball teams all take to the same field at the same time.
Treason!
The armed forces should concentrate on domestic enemies.
The Armed forces should focus on the defense of the country. The mission creep has become extreme.
Shows that NeoLibConism infests both US parties. They must be driven out.
We have disinformation coming out of everywhere now. I will either beleive it all or believe none of it. I won't decide which until after WWIII.
Hersh ends his usual extraordinary essay with a question: why does the administration pay no attention to Turkey's role in promoting ISIS? The answer has already been given by Israel's former ambassador to Washington - Michael Oren. He is reported to have said that Israel sees an Islamist regime in Syria as the lesser of two evils. No doubt Israel's agents in the US have taken up this idea and promote it among their allies in the US government. To Obama and congress, it seems, the interests of the government of Israel take precedence over all other considerations.
Remember how embarrassed the Secret Service was when an alleged intruder got well into the White House.
Do you really think that that was a fluke and not an organized attempt against Obama Bin Laden?
Barry O'toole and his CeeAyeApe handlers.
It is time for some to give an apology to Alex Jones and many of his guests. Welcome to the infowar, main stream America.
I still think AJ is controlled opposition in some ways, but yes, he is getting some of the message out.
Wow! ISISrael comes outta this piece smellin' like roses... who coulda possibly figured that? And what a relief!
With both the US and Russian governments 'accommodating' (ass-kissing) the Israeli regime (of Likudniks), it's getting pretty obvious who the real Rothschild-level masters are.
Let me know when Syria + Hezbollah + Russia clear out the Rebels/Jihadists in S. Syria and Golan Heights. Until then, or until I see a Russian-enforced NFZ over Syria, I remain rather skeptical about the whole 'war'.
The stuff re hezbollah was absurd.
And israel has zero intention of giving up golan and its oil anymore than they want peace with rather than the 'transfer' of the Palestinians.
'greater Israel' is what the puppet obama and his masters are working for.
As should be absolutely obvious to anyone not brainwashed by Ziomania.
When the elites start fighting amongst themselvs, will the means and the ends be good for the little people, or highly disruptive & destructive?
I can think of examples where everyone lost, and others where the boldest of the new criminal classes ascended, but none where ordinary people won.
We came close, here in the US, but our Constituion needs beefed up in the personal-pushback-power section.
I advocate the ability to pull out our gun and shoot any public agent who you think is violating your human rights in even the slightest degree.
If you want 6Sigma, you have to be extreme with your QA.
Maybe we'll get lucky and a hot war will break out between the Pentagon and Langley. In the preferred scenario they nuke each other in a mutually assured destruction sort of way.
Win/Win for all Americans not feeding at the MIC trough.
The last "why not?" Because Obomba, Lisa Monaco & Valerie Jarrett like "ass kissing little chickenshits" like Petraeus. If the US just got totally out of the Middle East and just paid cash got the oil we import it would be great to let these guys who have been fighting amongst themselves for CENTURIES go at it
and perhaps most important the military has the Hooveresque NSA on its side!
"An army marches on its stomach."
This saying, which attests to the importance of forces being well-provisioned, has been attributed to both Napoleon and Frederick the Great.
That is a very expensive 200lbs of rice and beans... WTF were they thinking?
this:
The Joint Chiefs let it be known that in return the US would require four things: Assad must restrain Hizbullah from attacking Israel; he must renew the stalled negotiations with Israel to reach a settlement on the Golan Heights; he must agree to accept Russian and other outside military advisers; and he must commit to holding open elections after the war with a wide range of factions included.
shows what the whole charade is all about
This is shaping up as an unwinnable multi-front war. Fucking with China and Russia by proxy (Israel/SA/Indonesia et.al) will just escalate this to a point on no return, which I feel has already been achieved. It won't be long now.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/rupert-murdoch-and-the-israeli-ge...
https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-exploits-syrian-chaos-plan...
And dont forget Leviathan.
qatari gas was going to be helped to compete with whatever gas israel owns and will steal from the eastern med, huh?
Lol.
Before you are impeached, Obama, mail your Peace Prize back to Norway you murderous ghoul
Martin Dempsey is a friend of my late father and I am relieved in a way that he stood up to the fiasco that is our foreign policy. While I would like to say this gives me hope, I still believe most Americans won't truly pay attention until either their bank accounts are seized or a nuke lands in their backyard.
What ever happened to old, what's his name? Snowden, that's it. I thought he was going to release a manure pile of information. Alas, nothing of note.
Nothing of note in terms of political effect, certainly. But vast amounts of detail about the capabilities of NSA's spying and its many partners.
NSA's powers have not been rolled back in the slightest, and have been recently extended by a 2nd patriot act.
Noticed any effect on the FF rate around the world?
I hope this gives Trump some good amo to pierce the ignorance of the brain-dead American sheeple.
Let's not cloud this news with rants because it's a serious disclosure about D.C. corruption:
1. Sometimes the Pentagon/US military show far more common sense about a sensitive issue than any of our political leaders.
2. This article perfectly confirms Obama as a very weak puppet for the financial powers ALONG WITH the fanatic Neo-Cons who have wormed themselves into this White House.
3. Historically speaking, when a nation's military circumvents its' "Commander-in-Chief," those fizzures become more and more dangerous because the nation itself is dying.
4. Now we are beginning to see why and how Russia and some of the EU Powers have staked their claim in Syria.
5. Sources of further tension: weapon dealers like Lockheed, Boeing/ the rabid Neo-Cons like Victoria Nuland/Cheneysque-types/the US financial hegemonic powers/the Western Media/ and the hapless Americans by the millions who don't have a clue as to what is going on.
This convoluted story makes no sense.
You can always tell that the "usual suspects" are starting to panic when they roll out Sy with a barrel-full of bullsht.
Ex-CIA Asset Can Now Speak.. 10 years after 9-11
Cool post. Thanks.
Fwiw I wouldnt take her too seriously. She's batshit and prone to... Fantasy, it seems.
On the other hand:
http://youtu.be/VeEMySFLoXg
Is worth a viewing.
As is this:
http://youtu.be/QphxGBXiA-M
We take our bits of information where we can get them. All of us are responsible for context, can't expect him to provide it.
There is nothing new in the phenomenon of cross-border military cooperation in the pursuit of goals contrary to the official policy of one or both nations. The US School of the Americas, now located in Fort Benning, Georgia, is an example of such. Officers from many Latin American countries were (are) being taught to transfer their loyalties from their home countries to the USA in a form of sponsored treason. Many forgot about that when they returned home and became military dictators, but some remained loyal to their sponsors.
I recall the case of a Nigerian general by the name of Chris Garuba who was the military commander of the UN Mission in Angola. He was on a first-name basis with the US ambassador. Unlike most of his collegues he was competent, sociable and honest. He had such fondness for his memories of many visits to Fort Levenworth Kansas, that he tried to convert the Mission compound into a patch of the US midwest. Using scarce water pumped from the nearby Kwanza river he insisted on keeping the grounds green in the face of prolonged drought. One of the results of this program was the breeding of mosquitoes which brought malaria to many members of the Mission and its neighbors.
The takeaway from this:
Obola is a puppet fully under control of the CIA (and NSA). He obeys CIA foreign policy of "Full Spectrum Destabilisation" because they have enough dirt on him (aka "control files") to bury his presidency. This means he ignores advice from the Pantygon.
For his part, he doesn't want to leave the Whiteman's House in a body bag.
So, we have Obola demanding that Assad must go, colluding with Erdogan in Turkey and training, arming and funding make-believe moderate rebels who are in fact flat-out extremists and terrorists.
This is what passes for democracy in 21st century.
You know the CIA reminds Obama regularly that if he wants to live to suck Reggie off another day, he will do as told
Urgh!
I've just recovered from a severe vomiting attack ;-)
"Treason doth never propser; what's the reason? Why, if it doth prosper, none dare call it treason." - John Harrington
You don't have to look very far for those who have prospered.
There's only one way this should end, now: the arrest for treason of all those PNAC/Wolfowitz Doctrine twits who lied us into the wars. For what else can you call these sins catalogued so damningly?
That would mean just about the entire top members, past and present, of the American political establishment for at least the past 15 years (CFR, American Trilaterals, American Bilderburg members, etc.). Presidents, Vice Presidents, members of the Cabinet, you get the idea. All who have been responsible for the foreign and domestic policies of the US leading up to all these disastrous 'wars of aggression' (recall the definition from Nuremberg) and the threat of nuclear war with a nation that tried to warn the US about 9/11 (Russia). No wonder Lil' Georgie is cooling his heels in Paraguay. He and his friends knew this day might come. Watch for the reports of other cockroaches scattering to their ex-pat boltholes, now.
This is coming out while the Tool-in-Chief is 'vacationing' in Hawai'i The timing is not accidental. Perhaps Christmas may come early for this benighted and betrayed Republic.
+1...welcome 2 ZH Kage'
Seymour Hersh is CIA and as such will do whatever he is told to discredit the Pentagon since they are enemies. According to Kameran Falie the CIA (Rothschild controlled) is attempting to create Armageddon in the Middle East by
using their mercenary army rather than the US military. He revealed Abu Ghraib for the same reason, hoping the US military would be forced to leave. For more info: http://projectcamelotportal.com/kerrys-blog/2730-kameran-faily-interview...
I think Faily's right about CIA objectives in the M/E and elsewhere.
If the CIA is controlled by Rothschild as he says, then that explains its M/E objectives which are only in the interests of Israel.
I am not so sure.
In my reading it is cia and obama that are discredited.
Hersh's perpetual non-mention of Israel where it begs at least some mention is however worth noting, in any case.
The 'please stop hezbollah from attacking poor peace loving Israel' thing makes zero sense. It is disinfo or at least horseshit.
"If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic."
Nonsesne: they are docile bodies to a man.
We are already ballistic with Obama. America is just waiting for the right time.
"If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic." -- Above commentary
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - - Henry Ford
See how important it is to keep secrets from the sheep. And they criticize the Chinese for spending trillions to keep their sheep quiet.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-22/chinas-cost-prevent-working-cla...
If Americans saw what intelligence reports? The MADE UP ones? Yea we'd be really really pissed of lol...
---
But, much as with Hersh's now-notorious bin Laden story, it is backed up with no evidence beyond the word of one anonymous "former senior adviser" to the Joint Chiefs.
This is the most convoluted clusterfuck in the history of mankind.
you got it. I've never seen a RATS NEST that stinks half as much as this one.
I guess you've never been close to alphahammer's dreadlocks.
Or this is a limited hangout by chief architect USA to blame Erdogan for everything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxvPfWkYyUo
Every action has many causes and many effects. I see no reason to choose.
Obama and his administration are capitves of the Washington Neo-Conservative community. Heavily funded by military and defense contractors, American Jews & AIPAC, major corporate interests in energy and Christian Zionist lunatics, the Neo-Conseravtives hold a death grip on the State Department, The CIA and the NSA. The military itself should be unpolitical, a follower of orders, this makes them only semi independent actors at the very best. Obama, Like Bush, Like Clinton, are totally under the administration of the Neo-Con establishment, both inside and outside government.
The anti Russia campaign, The Assad must go campaign, The Coup in Kiev & fascists support group, the maximum possible military spending clique, and others, are all versions of Neo-Conservative Washington. A shadow government if you will. No matter which party we may vote for, this Neo-Conservative War Party holds all the levers of power, and dictates to the new president what he/she will do.
Wall Street/Hedge Funds/Bankers have their power base, the Neo-Liberal school of economics, that rapes the 99%
The CIA, Zionists, and Big Military spenders have their Neo-Conservative War party, which see to it that over 1 trillion dollars a year is shared out to military and it's suppliers.
Also to be noted in the outlined Hersch scenario is that the Zios..typically...would have been playing the Military off against the CIA, insurance so that they would have been in the good graces of whoever prevailed. There has been so much printed lately about the CIA and military acting in cahoots as a hidden government (see for instance The Devil's Chessboard by D. Talbot) that this Hersch scenario could easily be a false flag to make critics hopeful that the malignant neocon machine might be breaking down.
SEYMOUR HERSH? C'mon!!!!!
Seymour needs to get some fucking religion and channel the past of Pierre Salinger who likewise destoyed his reputation and carried that shame to the grave...
For example. Seymour is the same genius that fell from glory as a reporter by swearing these things were true? Lets nnot even get into his complete batshit rendition of Osama Bin Laden...
*Much of the US special forces are controlled by secret members of Opus Dei,
*The US military flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training.
*The 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey.
The guy is about as reliable as a rusted out dump truck...
Wow, your redundant efforts to discredit this report speaks volumes. Sadly transparent. I don't ever give anyone too much credit, including Seymour, but you seem to really want this story downplayed.
Discredit this report? What report? This is mental made bullshit.
Son, he has not one shred of pyhsical proof. Everything in his "bombshell" story comes from his mind. He has ZERO factual hard proof and the info is supposedly from a "high level informant" who doesn't have a name.
Give it a break...
Pierre Salinger was 100 percent correct in his assertion of a US Navy shoot down of TWA 800. The FAA air traffic controllers at New York Center in Islip, New York, determined that they saw a missile on radar impact the 747 and notified the White House situation room.
Actually Salinger was 100% wrong. He fell for an Internet scam which was thoroughly debunked. He died a broken man.
Actually, not. The NTSB Chairmanship report reveals that the Islip FAA center notified the White House Situation Room and FAA headquarters of a missile strike on TWA 800. And one of the highly credible eyewitnesses was a decorated Naval Aviator from the Vietnam era who was flying a guard helicopter and witnessed the strike. He was a rescue helicopter pilot who had witnessed numerous surface to air missiles over North Vietnam.