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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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the maelstrom is spinning deeper and faster,while the controllers sit and watch,laughing and joking, taking bets.
Jack Oliver, SgtShaftoe and Son of Captain Nemo, plus a few others, seem to get it. The rest of you still have alot to learn. Let's not forget WHO Seymour Hersh really is. He's most likely a double agent, or worse. I mean for God Sakes he is the one who "blew up" the OBL story by REINFORCING the false narrative that OBL was killed in Pakistan in 2011. Limited Hangout anyone??? Remember what happened to Benazir Bhutto a few weeks after she disclosed that OBL died back in 2001 from kidney failure... she got shot in the head and blown up on video. This was a PM of a nuclear-armed country and CIA blew her head off as payback (and disuasion to any other public figures) for revealing the TRUTH!!!
Remember, 9/11 will always be the litmus test. OBL is another litmus test. Those OBL videos don't add up in terms of frequency, relevance and plain facial matching (towards the 2nd half of the video campaign) meaning FAKED to any trained eye.
You girls are getting sucked into the black hole of disinfo misinfo rabbit hole propaganda spiral-eyed bullshit. Otherwise, the trolls have gotten alot more sophisticated and numerous here on ZH. It can't be us few who recognize the faux revelations popping up in this piece. Seems to me like more of a PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT salvo in light of the Russians taking a bite out of CIA/MOSSAD/SAUDI/ISIS's ass and telling them to fuck off in Syria.
The lot of you have shown ZERO distinction from the fluoridated and hypnotized red and blue cheerleaders who keep CNN, Fox and MSNBC on the airwaves. You bunch of fucking retards.
Fight Club never fails to disappoint...
Lol...
Lets not forget that US Special Forces are contolled by Opus Dai...
BTW. Hersh wants the US to forge an alliance with Putin and Assad. So, your double, double, triple agent says what?
You sure are posting a lot here, falcon hammer.
Nervous?
Keep calm and drone on.
Don't forget to register your drone.
Hey! HOW COME THIS IMPORTANT STORY IS NOWHERE ON ZH?
---
War in Russia!!!!!!
The Russian Central Bank tipped off Deutsche Bank about suspicious activities with some of their account holders. These account holders are close insiders to ... wait for it ... Putin!
Deutsche Bank is now investigating up to $10 BILLION dollars worth of "mirror trades" that were made by these Putin confidants and the claims maybe money laundering. Global investigations have now swung into high gear.
So what we now have is this: The Russian Central Bank looks like its "sending a message" to Putin that his absolute -- country destroying -- rookie idea of how global macro economics works must stop. This means the real money in Russia has had enough!
Six months. Putin has maybe six months. This latest shot from the Russian Central bank is HUGE news -- and of course, on ZH? crickets...
"Six months. Putin has maybe six months."
Whereas you will be lucky to reach six weeks.
Make the most of it friend.
Are you pyhsically threating me? Go ahead say it again. Please do.
like your spunk 'hammer, (it's "threatening"), and you are in the Fight Club now, get used to it, or get beat up................
Can you at least try and make some sense? Rhetorical. Don't bother.
Are you seriously claiming to exist in the physical?
.
Well, whodda-yer-know. I thunk you was a troll-butt existing in the ether of a Deep State bunker and someone was about to pull your plug out to replace you with one of them Yomutti v2 later model devices. You know, one of them with two eyes instead of one and three legs and four safety grab-handles.
If Putin is fucking a bank it makes him more likeable
It's his own bank...
Tortured Russian logic again.
Putin needs high oil prices -- so he pumps at record levels to flood the market -- "to teach Saudia Arabia a lesson"
Brilliant.
I'm gald you're maintaining your position as the most ignorant fool here at ZH.
Right now Mr Moronsky, Putin knows that 'high oil prices' are as distant as your brain is from your head.
So Putin is doing what any shrewd head of state would do:
and if he fucks up the Saudis and everyone else, this is war, not tiddlywinks.
TIDDLYWINKS, THE ONLY THING ALPHAHAMMER EXCELS AT.
HOW PATHETIC IT MUST BE TO BE YOU!
"HE'S PUMPING AND SELLING AS MUCH OIL AS HE CAN BEFORE PRICES DROP EVEN FURTHER."
BBBBBWWWAAAAAHHHAAAA!!!!!!!
So Mr Buffet, what if oil goes up tomorrow and he sold at a discount?
What you basically said was that Putin knows what the price of oil will be in the future. Right. If that were the case, he wouldn't be in the shit house like he currently is.
BTW. In your "war" scenario, the House of Saud can ride out price drops a hell of a lot longer than Putin. Look what the Russian Central Bank just did. The Russian Central Bank just ratted out a bunch of Putin cronies for money laundering to the tune of $10 BILLION! Think about that. The RCB just turned on Putin. Putin is in deep doo doo here...
I'll tell you this one more time, dudeface.
the global economy is fucked six ways to Sunday and oil prices will hit $12 before they hit $45. I know it. Putin knows it. the ZH editors know it. But not alphahammer.
You know why you're so stupid?
BECAUSE YOU LIVE IN DENIAL.
Hey genius, if you absolutely 100% KNOW that oil will hit $12 before $45 -- THEN TRADE IT AND MAKE MORE MONEY THAN GOD AND BUY A GOLD PLATED JUMBO JET STAFFED WITH SUPERMODELS THAT FLYS TO YOUR PRIVATE ISLAND!
Dude, you just said with 100% certainty you KNOW which way the oil market will go! Anytime someone makes claims like that -- you should slam your wallet shut and run -- not walk -- run away as fast as possible.
Think about what you're saying. Before you say it...
Maybe if I were a witless, avaricious, money grubbing tribester like you, I would.
But I'm not. So I'll rest my case and repeat: oil will hit $12 before it gets to $45.
Instead of wasting your time here, get yourself an inflatable doll. They listen to everything you say and never talk back.
Because that's where Putin would keep his slush fund accounts if he does have them, the Russian central bank. Not one place in the world else.
Who owns the russian cb?
The same tribe that seems to have engaged in trades that arent actually illegal, but purportedly people under us sanctions
http://www.ibtimes.com/vladimir-putins-aides-including-rotenbergs-may-ha...
Because Putin didnt let the post US backed coup government in kiev, also lousy with the tribe, eject the Black Sea Fleet from Crimea, and assented to a Crimean parliamentary and popular vote to *rejoin* Russia.
Sanctions that are deeply hypocritical, if not actually violative of the UN charter which guarantees the self determination Israel is NEVER sanctioned for preventing as it routinely ignores un resolutions and international law.
So dry your panties, Rachel.
I aint buying any bullshit anyone is selling anymore, regardless of the source as it appears all sources are questionable and cover an agenda.
If I don't see it or hear it with my eyes and ears in person it isn't truth.
Too bad it had to get that way, but that is life.
How do you think Russian missiles were able to hit their targets dead-on-center? Russian economy is faltering, just like everywhere. You size up a situation and throw the proof into the garbage like a stupid fucker does. ISRAEL is watching and there are ASSASSINS everywhere. I posted a "ISRAEL IS FILLED WITH THIEVES AND LIARS" and received a threat from a mossad agent. What do you think AIPAC does to politicans who do not follow the script? Cancer is a virus.
Jacob Feller
Chat Conversation Start
Dec 6th, 1:20am
"I see that you have a very precious family. We all want to keep it that way, so I am asking you for starters in a nice way to stop posting your antisemitic rants on the Israeli site, known as Arutz Sheva, Member of The Mossad Secret Service of Israel."
Does anyone care to guess when Obama will give a press conference and declare that he just learned on TV that ISIS was getting support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey and of course contemptuously denying any US involvement?
Apparently he doesn't watch the news any longer. It violates his safe space
Only the CIA could share some intelligence with Assad.
The White House has no intelligence to speak of.
Wasn't Dempsey just retired?
Did u even read it?
OMG
A group of American military men doing something decent, honourable and for the good of the planet.
There is hope yet.
i call false flag... the real news is that the US just spent a trillion dollars on corruption, bribery and waste so it could lose a war in afghanistan
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/afghanistan-another...
this is the funny money cost..it does not count the lives lost or those wounded..as usual civilians (m&m's) outnumber military casualties by 40 times the US killed (around 2.500 v 100,000) and wounded (about the same), though these fugures look suspiciously low when compared to iraq.
http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2015/War%20Rela...
anyway, key point - the US invasion of afghanistan went the same way as the russian and british invasions of past decades and centuries
the difference is that a trillion dollars in afghanistan and 5 trillion in iraq has been spent on americans getting their asses kicked by guerilla fighters and making peoples lives hell, rather than spending 6 trillion dollars on infrastructure like roads, rails, airports, canals, river defences etc etc..
if successive POTUSes were strategists at IBM, HWP, GOOG, AAPL etc etc, they would have been shown the long walk into the forbidden zone..or told to go fight the war themselves, personally, like George Washington rather than playing with innocent US soldiers and foreign civilians lives.
just saying
Turkey, toldja so. You can never trust those SOB's or the Saudis or Qatar, they're fucking snakes.
That's why it would be good to break up Turkey and give the Kurds independence, preferrably before a long drawn out civil war there. Two smaller units may be more manageable.
But at the end of day we don't care any more about the region where everybody is always at some other's throat. What's the cheapest option, saving US, German, French, British and every other taxpayer from funding these quarrels. Let them stew in it, and let's save the money for people who are deserving. Even Ted Cruz's carpet bombing costs too much money.
agree with you.
the whole Middle East is a nest of Vipers.
Agreed, but...So are the israelis though you, like hersh, always seem to leave them out.
Guess who has the most influence in Vichy Washington?
The real news to me is not that Obama is a puppet - we all knew that. It's that the Deep State is not monolithic but composed of clans who don't get along with each other. They are battling each other while undercutting the president's authority. OK, saving this one for the files. Thank you Mr. Hersch.
Seymore "China Russia US world government" Free Gazza and liberate who? where were those box cutter guys from anyway?
Ya can't make this stuff up.....
USSA USSA USSA USSA USSA USSA
"Sweet Caroline ""Sweet Caroline ""Sweet Caroline ""Sweet Caroline "
Be all you can be! Be all you can be! Be all you can be!
DISGUSTING
if there's anybody out there WHO'S NOT IN BED WITH ASSAD ... could you raise your hand or something?
I just wanna' know.
Fact: As far back as May/2007, ~70% of America's Intel Budget was awarded to private contractors... according to the DNI (Director of Nat'l. Intel) statistics. The IC (Inteligence Community) is now widely known as a revolving door for admirals and generals who rotate into private industry's, and ironically back into the US Gov't DOD again (round trip? WHY?!?) The NCTC (Nat'l CounterTerrorism Center) and AFCEA (Armed Forces Communications and Electronic Assoc.) basically sums up todays I-IC (Intelligence-Industrial Complex.
Fact 2: Who are they? SAIC (Science Application s Intelligence Corp.), Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen`Hamilton, BAE Systems, Man Tech Int'l, etc., etc.,. This folly was all created by Bush #43 in 2005-06 on his 'Axis of Evil', war on TERROR!?! Note: According to 2008 leaked data the NCTC has a budget upwards of $50 Billion annually to finance the Private Sector (Publicly Traded Compay's on the US Stock Exchanges for profit?) Contractor's, this so called, 'Army of Spies'. Note2: In 2001 these private gov't security IC contractors totalled ~150 companies, but,.. as of documented research which is impossible to get transparency, because its all 'CLASSIFIED?'! As of late 2006, the private contractors has grown to ~5,500 (remember this is 2006), and not to bemoan the subject, it is 9yrs. hence! You be the judge of 101 Con/ K-Street selling out our country's security for profit, and... you'll get Hersh drift?
Fact 3: The 50 shades (colour(s)) of purple?
'Russia 's jet downed by Turk's?'
'Intelligence outsourcing has mushroomed at the DOD, which controls moar than 85% (2008 data) of the U.S. intelligence budget. On the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, civilian intel specialist under contract to the NSA (Nat'l Security Agency) and the NGIA (National Geospacial-Intelligence Agency) operate signals intelligence and imagery equiptment for Army and Marine units on the move against Iraqi insurgents and Islamic militia.s. NSA contractors also capture electronic signals emanating from enemy weapons, determine the exact type of weapons being fired, and relay that information to AWACS (Air Force Airborne Warning and Control Systems) aircraft flying overhead. At least 35% of the staff at the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) which provides intelligence to the SOD (Sec. of Def.) and Joint Chiefs of Staff, are employed by contractors. At the CT (Counterintelligence Field Activity), a Pentagon agency that was criticized by Congress in 2005 (remember Bush #43) for spying on American citizens, [well] the figure is 70%!'
go figure
please realize this all happened a decade ago...
things are definitely worstor in Black and White (the colour purple? for psychopaths!)
Good post. This is true across the board in the defense industry especially since the Gulf War in '91. There has been massive private outsourcing across almost every branch of the military service. I was utterly stunned how much of the logistics provess is overseen by the private sector with minimal oversight by the military especially in the Army.
I get the sense from what I have heard is that there has been massive looting and black material reselling of stuff that was supposedly 'destroyed' or left behind in Iraq/Afghanistan includig lots of military-grade equipment. Not talking small numbers either. Talking billions in outright graft by serviceman and private companies (looters).
Unlike after WW2 and the Korea War, Congress has zero interest in following up on this. What US politican wants to attack the one institution that has praise across all registered parties and find they US serviceman including sr folks were responsible for the theft of billions the past decade.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgig1QVU2lY
Abby Martin interviews retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former national security advisor to the Reagan administration, who spent years as an assistant to Secretary of State Colin Powell during both Bush administrations. Today, he is honest about the unfixable corruption inside the establishment and the corporate interests driving foreign policy.
Hear a rare insider's view of what interests are behind U.S. wars, the manipulation of intelligence, the intertwining of the military and corporate world, and why the U.S. Empire is doomed.
earle - *excellent* post. One of the best I've read on zh.
The private contractor part of the story deserves much more attention.
Both in providing 'intel' and in running black ops.
hersh does some great work, but he leaves out substantial portions of the story, as usual.
A breakout of global civil unrest as we embark on a clash of civilizations and a fight for survival in the new year, as it is reported that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is allegedly ‘Hitler’s Daughter’ and the Fourth Reich is about to become a reality......
http://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2015/12/the-fix-is-in-franc...
I thought the CIA was only for drug trafficking?
lol
EVEN MONEY says that this situation in Syria produces a nightmare and there are NO WINNERS.
Who could have ever imagined this administration would swing both ways. Yeah we fubared everything over here, but look over this way, we did everything right. Not buying it.
Ok i'm crosseyed now.
Won't it feel like a relief when the new president is in and the book finally closes on the last 8 years? Time has stood still in the mass media for the duration, perpetually freezing the public in 2009. Every effort of the so called establishment has been to stop the flow of information, stop people communicating, and hide the state of the nation. This leads to an eerie feeling of deja vu, chronically stretched out over a decade. It's almost an experiment in mass psychosis.
While nobody believes that a new president is really going to fix anything, the media obsession with stasis to hide the foibles of the current president will stop. There will at least be new lies, and new screw ups to hide. Maybe a colorful personality would be a harbinger of change in its own right.
Tired of Obama, Bush, Clinton. If we have a show president, we should at least have a show. Obama is as dull as a bag of hammers.
I've heard / read elements within the military were acting with honor, refusing to be ISIS's airforce, refusing treasonous orders from above, at least we now have confirmation.
No you haven't.
There is a parallel universe, created by the failure to shine a light on the elitists' hopelessly dirty laundry by media and journalists. Murders are at large and they are very fucking rich.
Here is just one example of a trail of destroying the competition, paying off the assasins and carrying on like Lady Justice is not only gagged, blindfoled and pigtied. Justice is on a hunger strike.
DISAPPEARING A PROBLEM (unnecessary delays by first responders)
The Strange Death of Edmond Safra is one example.
In December 1999, just months after concluding the $10.3 billion sale of his Republic National Bank, in which he held a 29% stake, to HSBC, Safra died when a fire swept through his duplex penthouse in Monte Carlo, Monaco, in what immediately made worldwide news and has slaked the thirst of conspiracy theorists everywhere. The blaze was ultimately ruled an arson, and his nurse, Ted Maher of the U.S., was convicted of setting the fire.
“She’s an amazing philanthropist, but she’s got a story,” said Vincent. A story that just got a little more enticing, as most forbidden things are.
http://politicalvelcraft.org/2014/06/06/senate-reports-narco-bank-hsbc-h...
THE PAY OFF
http://www.kurzmannlaw.com/mark2.html -
Former Justice Department Kursmann Law represented Heidi Maher in her suit for 60 million dollars for the brutal police interrogation she was forced to endure.
This case disappeared off the map.
http://nypost.com/2003/05/27/60m-safra-suit-killers-wife-hits-widow-over...
Deceased nurse's family receives 20 million. Sues for 60 million more.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&add...
"The suit says Torrente’s autopsy showed “there were ‘combat-like’ marks on [her] neck . . . and blood in her thyroid, indicating that Vivian Torrente struggled to escape the bathroom where she and Mr. Safra were located, and that Mr. Safra restrained her and prevented her escape.” The mom “also had bruises on her knees and Mr. Safra’s DNA under her fingernails,” the suit says. Both died of asphyxiation. McCallion said the autopsy report was “inconclusive” as to whether she was asphyxiated by the smoke or by Safra putting her in a choke hold. The suit adds that Jason, 30, and Genevieve, 23, didn’t know about the autopsy report until Maher’s trial – and accuses Safra’s widow, Lily, of conspiring with various insurance companies to keep the details of their mother’s death a secret."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&add...
"Independent
By John Lichfield in Paris
04 March 2005
"The few sketchy details to have emerged on the death this week of the French banker Edouard Stern read like the first chapter of a thriller. Rich and handsome, the only son of a celebrated Jewish banking family, M. Stern, 50, was a man whose eventful career had made him many enemies. Swiss authorities confirmed yesterday that the millionaire was shot dead in his bedroom in his fifth-storey penthouse apartment in a wealthy area near the old town of Geneva. No trace was found of a struggle or break-in. Authorities were treating the death as murder, or possibly an assassinat - a premeditated killing. At first the Geneva public prosecutor's office refused to confirm that the dead man found in the flat was M. Stern, one of the most respected, and loathed, financiers in the world."
Lily The Widow Extraordinaire - Man eater.
"At the age of 19, Lily Watkins married an Argentinean hosiery magnate, Mario Cohen, and bore him three children before they divorced in the early 1960s. In 1965 she wed Freddy Monteverde, the head of a Brazilian electrical distribution business. But as he struggled under the pressure of the job he killed himself in his mansion in Rio leaving his wife a personal fortune of 200 million.
Read more: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/who-killed-ed-safra-1-629354#ixzz3v8cybwgnFollow us: @TheScotsman on Twitter | TheScotsmanNewspaper on Facebook
THE PROSECUTOR
"DANIEL Serdet, the tough-talking Monaco prosecutor and Attorney General who, three days after Safra’s death in 1999, announced that a male nurse named Ted Maher had confessed to stabbing himself and setting the blaze that killed his employer in a bizarre plot to win favour with the banker. "He wanted to be a hero and be seen to have saved his boss," Serdet said.
Serdet was criticised after releasing a statement to the press about Maher, saying that at the time of the fire he was highly agitated, "psychologically fragile and under the influence of medication".
Read more: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/who-killed-ed-safra-1-629354#ixzz3v8eCRygmFollow us: @TheScotsman on Twitter | TheScotsmanNewspaper on Facebook
"Safra’s security chief, Shmuile Cohen, had recruited a number of Israeli military special forces personnel to guard Safra, but Shmule and the guards were given the night off by Safra’s wife."
THE WIDOW X 3 Lily Safra's husbands die in car crash, bullet wounds (2 - in the stomach!) during suicide, and locked in the bathroom of smoke asphyxiation.
"Called "The Gilded Lily" by the New York gossip columnists, Safra was sleeping in a separate wing from her husband and escaped the fire that swept through their penthouse. A renowned philanthropist, she dedicates herself to funding charitable causes around the world. She has also become a close friend of Camilla Parker Bowles and is rumoured to be a key member of Prince Charles’s inner circle of confidantes.
"According to Vincent’s reporting, in 1969 Monteverde was approaching a deal to divorce Safra when he was suddenly found dead with two shots into his chest. Brazilian authorities have ruled it as a suicide, while Monteverde’s will left Safra all his assets.
The Monteverde family, who was cut off from the will by Safra, has always disputed the suicide verdict, and ever since questioned the police’s account. “That’s fantasy,” Watkins told O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper. “I never imagined going through something like this. My father was an extremely correct man, dedicated to his family and he always kept himself distant from his celebrity sister.”
http://freethoughtmanifesto.blogspot.com/2009/08/epicenter-of-kosher-nos... "Another prominent Syrian Jew was Edmond Safra who founded Banco Safra in Brazil in 1955. The Beirut-based Safra family had long served as important bankers for the Ottoman Empire. Safra eventually became a billionaire banking and investment tycoon. Safra founded the Republic National Bank in New York in 1966." Dwek – the son of a prominent Syrian rabbi –stole millions in a large bank fraud but agreed to help prosecutors catch corrupt politicians. Dwek did that, but on the way also helped the feds catch several Syrian and Ashekenazi haredi rabbis who laundered millions of dollars through their charities and committed other crimes. The 2009 sting and subsequent guilty please sent shockwaves through the Orthodox and haredi communities. A Brooklyn haredi man, Levi Itzhak Rosenbaum, was also caught selling black-market kidneys. In all, 46 people, most of them politicians, were arrested." Dwek could have served 30 years in prison for the bank fraud alone, but instead Dwek pleaded guilty and agreed to help the government catch crooked politicians."Solomon Dwek Gets Out Of Prison Early
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
Less than 30 months after being sentenced to six years in prison for his role in the largest corruption sting in New Jersey history, Ponzie-schemer turned federal cooperating witness Solomon Dwek was released from federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland, NJ.com reported. He was transferred to a residential re-entry center in Baltimore where his family now live, and was immediately transferred from there into home confinement."
@BunnySwanson
Bookmarked a note from a Rob Kirby podcast.
He made a not so flattering statement re: Safra's death & Martin Armstrong running his mouth about it & being the reason why he was thrown in the hoose gow.
The CIA has become the political tool of presidents, both 'Republican' and Democrat. It started in 1975 when President Ford fired long-time CIA official and director William Colby and replaced him with George HW Bush. Until then, CIA people were actually barred from running for President (or VP) under traditionally accepted rules.
Yeah, and anytime you see one of these CIA dickheads depicted in one of the network national security dramas they always come off as, well, dickheads. What type of tool executes orders for O'bama or Bush? PATHETIC!!!
Is there anyone in the USA who wakes up every day and wishes he or she were a Clinton or a Bush? I thought so, so then why???.......
Another overblown anti article … “media hound shills info to grumpy old bigoted conspiracy paranoids on zero hedge” … check you source's background … for example …
Seymour Hersh's 1997 book about John F. Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot, made a number of controversial assertions about the former president, including that he had had a "first marriage" to a woman named Durie Malcolm that was never terminated, that he had been a semi-regular narcotics user, and that he had a close working relationship with mob boss Sam Giancana which supposedly included vote fraud in one or two crucial states in the 1960 presidential election. For many of these claims, Hersh relied only on hearsay collected decades after the event. In a Los Angeles Times review, Edward Jay Epstein cast doubt on these and other assertions, writing, "this book turns out to be, alas, more about the deficiencies of investigative journalism than about the deficiencies of John F. Kennedy." Responding to the book, historian and former Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called Hersh "the most gullible investigative reporter I've ever encountered."
You people get shilled into the most ridiculous bullshit ...
I concur. I think the cointelpro’s are making some over hours just like the button pushers on the PPT. Go nuts!
Decoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4K-mInFXCI
Thanks ... imho reacting obsessively, either to the positive, or to the negative, to social or political information or personalities, allows the producers of this info to influence one’s attitude towards this world, this life … here and now … if you will.
The purveyors of these strong opinions have agendas. They are likely paid. The resulting process is not conducive to good physical or mental health.
What flavor of bullshit is your favorite? C'mon, you can tell us. You tin foil true believer nutjob.
I guess what your asking is what is my religious/political/social stance so one can pigeon hole properly.
I am not religious in the organized sense so nominal Christian;
Registered Democrat but just for a single vote vendetta purpose, previously Libertarian, previously Republican;
I am amazed by racial, sexual preference, sex, you name it bigotry and how misguided it is. I basically look upon bigotry as watching someone call a parent an offensive name in front of his or her small child. I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want anything to do with that type of person. I am ashamed of them. I am ashamed for them. Do you want to be that person?
I believe nothing. They all lie. Read it, opine, move on.
you may wish to read Michael Collins Piper's book on the matter.
someone posted the jcs would never do this..well thinking back to Nixon, the Cia democrat wing set up nixon..the watergate breakin could have been a plot to bring nixon down. since watergate how many stories of crime in high places have just gone away?? for a short list: gun running, sandy berger and what docs did he destroy?, IRS and Lois Lerner, JFK, ..
when crime is a tool (cia running drugs and guns,)tarp and bank bail outs and hank paulson's get out of jail free deal.
we are dealing with crime and criminals at the very top-so of course they plot against each other.. and policy becomes chaotic and counter to the story of protecting america and our jobs and way of life..common sense.
Because Obama does not listen to anybody but himself, and therein lies the problem with Obama, he is his own worst enemy and eventually his own worst enemy will destroy Obama.
I instantly thought of the Paul Craig Roberts interview the other day. Somebody is lieing. Who? Who knows. PCR definitely is speaking from one side. "The other side is evil, not me and not my friends." But are the JCoS telling the whole truth? I doubt it. They are each playing for their piece of the pie. Or maybe telling their truth from an extremely biased point of view.
It is about power and about not being hung from a lamp post in the end.
I know what I believe until a better answer comes along.
Occam's razor? Qui Bono? Maybe just words. My synapses's(?) are the only ones I know.
Everybody wants to be a copy-kat puke.
Ooogga...boogga...cry havoc/wolf over and over and sooner or later...bing...badda...bang!..after they fall asleep again.
Check it:
http://patriotrising.com/2015/12/22/23147/
MERRY EVERYTHING!
Trump for POTUS
Matt Lee for VP
Jen Psaki to swing by her copious nipples
Europe is increasingly desperate for a solution here and to limit of influx of refugees from Iraq and Syria which are predicted are to enormous from what I saw in '16. They'll realize they are going to be left holding the bag for the Americans, Israelis, and the Gulf State Arabs on this issue.
As long as Putin doesn't saber rattle in the Ukraine or do something really bat shit crazy aggressive like invade one of the Baltic states, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see the Europeans increasingly pressure for a political solution here that includes Assad remaining in place.
Homosexual King's Nonesuch opera
Live with it
on your face
Lost me here:
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;
Hezbollah's katyusha rockets were making pot holes in Israel's highways.
Its all bullshit.
Think about what Hersh said. Hersh wants us to believe that the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- the highest military men in our government with > 30 years in service each -- ALL unanimously agreed to treason (yes, Hearsts allegations equal treason) in order to make Obama look bad. Sure.
Just the thought of presenting this treasonous idea to the different members of the JCS would mean disaster. At a minimum at least one officer (actually all of them) would go ballistic when presented with the idea that he should commit treason. Never. Gonna .Happen. Period.
This entire thing is such bullshit. The idea that the JCS would commit treason simply to shame Obama and with hundreds of moving parts and people knowing the operational details -- and think they'd get away with it...
Complete damned fiction.
But wait! It could be true because according to Hersh, Americas entire special forces operations are controlled by a rogue faction of Opus Dei... Lol...
The guy needs to have a psychological evaluation.
As 1st Lord of the Admiralty in the Chamberlain Govt in 1939-40 Winston Spencer-Churchill maintained secret channels to FDR and to Ivan Maisky the USSR Ambassador undermining Chamberlain
Maybe so. I'll take your word for it. But there was no such thing as Google, Twitter and Facebook that could expose their treason in a nanosecond. Today that exists. Every treasonous idea that man thinks of is scared shitless of Twitter and what it could do to their plan -- and also insure a 1,000 year life imprisonment...
The US DOD and government at large cant keep a damned secret for shit. The highest ranking general (s) in the US would risk literally everything against the backdrop of Twitter and enough leaks to sink a battleship simply to make Obama look bad? No.
FDR used US Navy relay stations to by-pass State Dept channels. Spencer-Churchill had been in pay of Czech Government pre-war and a group of Shell executives kept him afloat financially
hmmm
Lo and behold, Israel assassinates Kuntar with rockets fired from Lebanon into his West facing apartment in a building outside of Damascus.
Hezbollah immediately fires it's pathetic rockets into Israel drawing a response.
Does anyone know for a fact that Kuntar is dead?
In Summary, the Joint Chiefs have crossed the red line in the sand.
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I find it very very easy to be true
For you I know I'd try to turn the tide
Because you're mine, I walk the line.
No they didn't. This is pure fantastical bullshit.
You think?
So Seymour Hersh prints that and, deus ex machina, the Pentagon is off the hook for any and all of its hideous behavior since the invasion of Iraq. For example the bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz.
In the dictionary under the word propaganda is Seymour Hersh's picture.
A plague on all 17 of our houses. In your spare time read Guns of August by Tuchman if you want to see how WWIII starts.
It's very possible that Hersh's article is nothing more than speculation and fantasy. It would be a serious situation if the Joint Chiefs of Staff undercut the position of the American President.
More likely - someone has an ax to grind and they are feeding this baloney to Hersh. Someone outside the Defense Department who specializes in backstabbing. Don't ask me who, but people in Washington DC will know.
Reading this made me smile. I will sleep better tonight knowing the muslim in the house will not have his way all the way.
Compared to many articles/posts here at ZH and elsewhere this is certainly one of the longest which otherwise known would be "dazzling with bullshit". Hersh spins a story that allows anyone who is seeking truth to pick and choose one from column A, three from column B and two from column C. It's like a Rorschach test for understanding the NWO. I've read some good narratives here at ZH and other sites as well as input from other ZH readers and have my own conclusions which, conflict with Hersh's point of view. In a way it strikes me as disinformation central and too much of it could actually affect the nervous system. While making points that would leave many of our uncurious fellow citizens baffled and still find agreement with the ZH family, other perspectives interspersed tend to strike me that Hersh is either a fool or he believes the audience is?
i agree with your sentiment - Hersh has limited hi "story" to his own initial agneda, political biases and are not "objective" - his facts fit his agenda that he has set out for himslef. the ministry of propaganda would be proud and no doubt he has been paid well, by someone, probably on tghe east coast of the Med.
Fantastic article people! Good on ya ZH!
I have said it before, I'll say it again; save humanity all the grief and destruction and get Civil War 2 reloaded. Civil War 1 was by far our best bout of slaughter, EVER. It caused more destruction, cost more and was simply more productive in terms of bodies bagged. It is obvious to the entire planet that something is totally wrong with this pathocracy we call USSA. The need for carnage is total and obviously the rest of the planet as victim comes nowhere near satiating the lust for death and blood that the Washing town thugocracy requires for their gods. Hence the solution is to bring total war home and turn this Third World Fourth Reich into the image of USSAN "democracy" we have been spreading around the Earth for more than a hundred years.
Onward immediately to the collapse and the destruction of the cancer!
God to see that the men on the ground, US soldiers, still got some common sense and support Syria and Assad.
interesting article. However, I think the driving force behind the anti-Assad US wing is to weaken Iran. If Jihadists take over Syria, they might be able to kill some Israelis, but their actual threat is muted. On the other hand, if Assad stays, that means Iran has access right next to Israel, and after this war Iran will certainly have bases in Syria. This is a much more serious threat to Israel.
Nonsense insofar as Iran is really a threat, true insofar as the idea is to weaken irans ability to defend itself from a us/israeli war of aggression.
Israel's us taxpayer funded military, its nukes, and american support are all vastly more powerful than iran which is rightly concerned about anglo-zionist attacks on it.
Israel is not the victim, it just plays one on tv.
http://youtu.be/QphxGBXiA-M
https://theintercept.com/2015/03/02/brief-history-netanyahu-crying-wolf-...
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/07/netanyahu-implicated-in-nuclear-smuggling-...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37993.htm
http://lobelog.com/suspicions-persist-about-iranian-laptop-of-death/
http://www.juancole.com/2015/08/inspect-nuclear-facilities.html
http://news.antiwar.com/2015/08/19/bogus-ap-claim-of-iran-self-inspectio...
Same playbook as used by the Ziopaths to help lie us into Iraq.
http://writersviews.com/article-demonization-prelude-to-war.php
All while it escapes criticism and sanction for repeated war crimes.
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/israels-extermination-...
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/07/country-holding-accountable
The truth about Hersh ..
Turks, Kurds, Nerds, and Turds
Who are we????
Hersh always a good read since My Lai 4. Much better than the (press).
http://youtu.be/QphxGBXiA-M
If you missed it (11Dec2015), General Michael Flynn interview on RT:
https://www.rt.com/shows/sophieco/325569-strategy-isis-terrorism-attacks/
Whenever I watch Sophie, I get completely distracted from whatever is being discussed. She's toooooooo hot :-)
Her? You must like that shiny-face look. Otherwise, she's a 6.
That's the skin cream she uses when on TV shows ......:-)
Geopolitics is a dirty and devious business and we are now seeing the rise of the 4th Reich......
http://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2015/12/the-fix-is-in-franc...
I wish it were so. More like the New Comintern.
Kuddos to the Joint Chief of Staff for working against Barack Obomber.
Now when do the USA citizens take their own power back from politicians?
We simply need to ban liberals from the country.
Wherever they end up, please go with to chaperone.
We would have none of these problems if Liberals were banned and destroyed. Why do we allow libtards to even exist? Conservative, traditional values are the only views that matter. All other views in the USA should be quelled, squashed, and eliminated. Praise Jesus.
Sweet pot stirring, troll bro.
The Neocons (read: Israeli Loyal Jews) are using the USSA to destablize the Middle East in the delusional hope of creating a Greater Israel, from Baghdad to the Nile. These shitbirds don't care if millions die and the stupid Americans bankrupt themselves. What has Assad done ? Lisping Lindsay aka "CoCo", Insane McCian et al are stooges for these arrogant fools - not one Arab leader overthrown and murdred by the USSA deserved that fate - people - please try to do a little critical thinking.
I feel fully vindicated. Thank you Seyour Hersh for getting this right and in print. Now let's hope the "compliant" MSM in the USA starts asking some damn hard questions of the Obama Whiteouse for once.
"Why are you supporting terrorists, Mr. Fucking President? Why are you supporting a Islamist dictator in Turkey, you dip shit moron? How does you social justice narrative end up producing support for misogynist, fascist theocratic gangs of thugs and what happened to your duty to advance the interests of the American People?"
Questions along those lines are entirely appropriate and long over due.
"The military is not stupid. They know about the Joo World Order and they are not down."
Call me stupid, but HOW could ISIS control of Syria BE to the Jews in Israel's advantage?.
Libya's fall,and Iraq's, has done nothing but spread the Caliphate, and using ISIS & Al Qaeda to do so.
The Dictator's (that were so horrible) that were taken down, were better to/for their people than what has replaced them.
(See EU refugees,murdered Christians and the American Gov't, Oboomby importing Muslim's into our backyards).
"Muricans are hopelessly far to the left of the Bell Curve. We need more Chinese, Koreans and Japanese immigration. Less African, Middle East and Mexico."
Well you have part of your dream, Chinese now outnumber Mexicans in Kali, and that's a good thing.
It is obvious that information from the Joint Chiefs was used differently by Germany, Russia and Israel.
Germany sat on its hands. Russia went in and killed the enemy - for which they were rewarded with a downed civilian airliner and their airmen near the Turkish border; two incidents with the lies of ISIS/CIA/Mossad/Mi6 all over these incidents - by deliberate intel ommision or actual commission.
Turkey and its Donmeh jews do not act alone. Nothing happens over Egyptian airspace without big powers knowing or approving.
I for one am extremely unhappy about this:
Not so. Germany's BND has been cooperating with Assad's Intelligence Services