West Busted Supporting ISIS ... Tries Instead to Point Finger At Syrian Government
America's closest allies [10] have been busted supporting ISIS in order to topple Syria's government. Mainstream U.S. writers are calling for open support [11] of ISIS and Al Qaeda to enact regime change in Syria.
And a newly-declassified government document hints that the West supported the creation of ISIS [12].
This may sound far-fectched and wild-eyed ... But the following former high-level US and UK intelligence officials and whistleblowers confirm [13] that the document implicates the West in the birth of ISIS:
- Military analyst - and famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower - Daniel Ellsberg
- High-level NSA official Thomas Drake
- Well-known FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley
- Senior MI6 officer Alastair Crooke
- MI5 counter-terrorism officer Annie Machon
- British counter-terrorism officer Charles Shoebridge
In any event, whether or not you believe the West created ISIS, the U.S. is now trying to blame the single most unlikely entity imaginable for ISIS ... the Syrian government.
Specifically, the U.S. Embassy in Syria just accused [14] the Syrian government of supporting ISIS:
This is all kinds of silly ... and is Iraq War propaganda redux.
Specifically, the Syrian government and ISIS are mortal [15] enemies [16].
The Syrian government - which is allied with Shia Muslims - has been battling Sunni jihadis [17] for many years. ISIS are Sunnis ... the arch-enemy of Shias [18] and the Syrian government. The Syrian government is ruled [19] by a sect of Shias called Alawites [20].
In other words, ISIS and the Syrian government are on opposite sides of the war, and have been ever since ISIS was formed.
Similarly, in the run up to the Iraq War, Bush and the gang said that Saddam was in bed with Al Qaeda. Only one little problem: Saddam and Al Qaeda hated each other's guts [21].
Flashback: A Bogus Iraq-Qaeda "Connection"
Because the accusations that the Syrian government is supporting ISIS mirror so closely what happened in the run up to the Iraq war, let's recap [22] ...
5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said “my interest is to hit Saddam” [23]. He also said “Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” [24]
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time”, is the statement “Hard to get a good case.” [25] In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, “Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda” [26].
And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy [27].
And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis [28]. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11 [29].
Moreover, President Bush’s March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq [30], includes the following paragraph:
(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks.
Indeed, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reports [31] that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this [32].
Suskind also revealed that “Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official ‘that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.’ ”
Cheney made the false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 on many occasions [33].
For example, according to Raw Story, Cheney was still alleging a connection between Iraq and the alleged lead 9/11 hijacker in September 2003 – a year after it had been widely debunked. When NBC’s Tim Russert asked [34] him about a poll showing that 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11, Cheney replied:
It’s not surprising that people make that connection.
And even after the 9/11 Commission debunked [35] any connection, Cheney said [36] that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime , that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties.
Again, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this [36], this [37], this [38].
On December 16, 2005, Bush admitted “There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the attack of 9/11″ [39] (and see this video [40]). However, Bush and Cheney continued to frequently invoke 9/11 [41] as justification for the Iraq war. And see this [42]. (Cheney finally admitted [43] in 2009 that there was no link.)
A bipartisan Senate Report from 2006 found that Bush misled the press on Iraq link to Al-Qaeda [44].
The administration’s false claims about Saddam and 9/11 helped convince a large portion of the American public to support the invasion of Iraq. While the focus now may be on false WMD claims, it is important to remember that, at the time, the alleged link between Iraq and 9/11 was at least as important in many people’s mind as a reason to invade Iraq [45].
Top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions [46] in an attempt to create such a false linkage.
McClatchy reported [47] in 2009:
Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration…
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
***
When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.”Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
“I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”
Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.
The Washington Post reported [48] the same year:
Despite what you’ve seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.
So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a “ticking time bomb” scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
***
Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: “Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe.
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff (Colonel Larry Wilkerson) also wrote in 2009 that the Bush administration’s “principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda [49].”
Here We Go Again ...
Of course, truth is the first casualty of war, and so the fact that the Syrian government and ISIS are mortal enemies or that Saddam and Al Qaeda hated each other makes no difference in the middle of a tidal wave of propaganda.
The U.S. has decided on regime change (again!) in Syria [50], just like it committed to regime change (again!) in Iraq [50].
And America will say and do anything to get its war on.