A Military, Political And
Economic 'Matrix'
Which Has Lost Its 'Moral Foundation'
Ex Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev
Denounces NATO Two Decades After The Alleged End Of The Cold War
As Former FBI And CIA Officials Expose
NATO Covert Operations To Foment Civil War In Syria
www.nlpwessex.org/docs/gorbachevNATO.htm
February 2012
| 'Those Who Assist Are Culpable' |
"In Syria,
little unites those opposed to Bashar Assad other than their enmity. ...... Should the
Assad regime fall.... sectarianism may well engulf Syria. ....Those
who assist in the downfall of even the most horrific regime share in culpability for what
follows it, and in Syria that may be
something ugly indeed."
Syria’s Assault
London Times, 9 February 2012, Print Edition, P2 |
"NATO is already clandestinely engaged in the Syrian conflict, with Turkey
taking the lead as U.S. proxy. ...... Unmarked NATO
warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to
Iskenderum on the Syrian border, delivering weapons from the
late Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals as well as volunteers from the Libyan Transitional
National Council who are experienced in pitting local volunteers against trained soldiers,
a skill they acquired confronting Gaddafi’s army. Iskenderum is also the seat of the Free
Syrian Army, the armed wing of the Syrian National
Council. French and British special forces trainers are on the ground, assisting the
Syrian rebels while the CIA and U.S. Spec Ops are providing communications equipment and
intelligence to assist the rebel cause, enabling the fighters to avoid concentrations of
Syrian soldiers. ...... Syrian government claims that it is being assaulted by rebels who
are armed, trained, and financed by foreign governments are
more true than false."
Philip
Giraldi, former senior CIA officer, whose career postings included Turkey
NATO vs. Syria
The American
Conservative, 19 December 2011
More Than A Decade Of Repeated NATO
Aggression And Moral Failure
Is Encouraging Nuclear Proliferation In A Zero-Sum Game - Mikhail Gorbachev
"What happened after the Soviet Union
ended in 1991? Why were the opportunities to build what Pope John Paul II called a more
stable, more just and more humane world order not realized? ... the old methods,
such as using military force and political and
economic pressure to impose one model on everyone,
would still be used. Within such a matrix, the United Nations and its Security Council become expendable or at best
an impediment, while international law is viewed as a burdensome legacy of the past. That
was the attitude taken by the United States and its supporters in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and in Iraq in 2003. ...... International organizations, particularly the United Nations,
crippled by the unilateralism of the United States and NATO, are still faltering, unable to fulfill their task of conflict
settlement..... Policy-making and political thinking
are still militarized. This is particularly true in the United States, which has not
renounced the methods of pressure and intimidation. Every time it uses armed force against
non–nuclear weapon states, countries such as Iran become more determined to acquire nuclear
weapons...... I am convinced that it is time to
return to the path we charted together when we ended the cold
war. Once again, the world needs new thinking, based not just
on the recognition of universal interests and of global interdependence but also on a
certain moral foundation.... politics becomes dirty and a zero-sum, lose-lose game only when it
has no moral core. This, perhaps, is the main lesson
to be learned from the past two decades."
Mikhail Gorbachev
Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union?
The
Nation, 21 December 2011
 |
Left, former
Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Right, former FBI Turkic languages specialist, Sibel
Edmonds.
Mr Gorbachev has recently accused NATO
of failing to shake off its old cold war mentality,
whilst Mrs Edmonds has reported
that NATO has been secretly training and arming the Syrian rebels in Turkey since the
spring of 2011, with the matter now covered in the Turkish media, but not in the west. The
question is, why not? |
In marking the passing
of two decades since the end of the Soviet Union former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
has taken the opportunity to condemn NATO for continuing its destructive 'cold war'
mentality right into the 21st century. He describes it as being in the grip of a military,
political and economic 'matrix' which has lost its 'moral foundation'.
His remarks at the end of 2011 were preceded
by those of former FBI Turkic language specialist Sibel Edmonds who has exposed
America's cold war style covert operations, conducted jointly with Turkey, against Syria.
Those two NATO countries have been secretly training and arming the
Syrian rebels since the spring of 2011 in an operation reminiscent of the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s when the Reagan administration
ran a similar exercise to try and destabilise Nicaragua.
The current revolt in Syria is not quite as
spontaneous as it may seem. America's covert destabilisation programme for Syria began in
2006 when, as the Washington Post reports, the US State
Department began secretly putting money into Syrian opposition groups. But Syria is not
the ultimate target.
The main leading article in the print edition
of the London Times 21 February states that "The world is sleepwalking
towards a war in the Gulf."
There have been reports that both Israel and
America are preparing for a military strike on Iran later in the year.
It is widely believed that any such strike would precipitate attacks on Israel by Iran,
Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Syria. If an attack on Iran is planned then there is clearly a
great advantage to achieving regime change in Syria in advance, or at least ensuring that
that Syria is simultaneously bogged down in civil war. The discovery that NATO has been
covertly training and arming the anti-Assad rebels, and therefore fomenting civil war in
Syria, since the spring of 2011 is entirely consistent with this scenario.
However, the international intelligence
consultancy STRATFOR has warned that such arms are likely to fall into the hands of Sunni
jihadists who are now pouring into the country to try and topple the Shia aligned Assad
regime. STATFOR states (14 February) that, "The
collapse of the Syrian state in turn would allow the jihadists a wide arena in which to
operate, stretching from Lebanon to Iraq and putting them very close to Jordan, Israel and
the Palestinian territories -- the best theater a jihadist could ask for. ....
A potential collapse of the Syrian state greatly increases the risk of a regional
sectarian war that al Qaeda could greatly benefit from." In reality,
however, other reporting confirms that such people are already being
armed by NATO, either directly, or through proxies, in 'deniable'
covert operations, and have been since last year.
If Assad falls during this episode, he will
have been the third anti-'al Qaeda' secular leader in the Arab world to have been toppled
by the west since 9/11, along with Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi.
When a leader like Assad concludes that he is
being cornered, he becomes ferocious. Yet, the terrible killing to date in Syria is likely
to be modest compared to that which can be expected to follow his forcible ouster. With
the external push for regime change intensifying the Syrian people now face, Iraq style,
carnage of an altogether greater scale than has taken place during the rule of Assad.
The Shia-Allawite and Christian communities
will be the chief targets of such slaughter. Many of those deaths will come (indeed, they are already happening) at the hands of elements in the Sunni community whom
the western press like to call 'al Qaeda' when it suits, but merely 'freedom fighters'
when not (as has just happened in Libya).
Covert involvement to foment civil war in
Syria by NATO countries (also confirmed by former CIA counter-terrorism officer Philip Giraldi and Israel's DEBKAfile,
as well as others) is presumed by many to be the 'prelude' to a strike on Iran by
Israel, with or without the co-operation of the United States. In a presidential election
year Washington could say 'no' in public to Israel on such a gambit, but
'yes' in private.
If NATO really wishes to see others abandon
the pursuit of nuclear weapons it is difficult to see how its continuing aggressive
behaviour against countries it dislikes is going to achieve that aim. Libya's Colonel
Gaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons programme in return for what he thought were improved
relations with NATO countries. He then found himself summarily executed with spectacular
barbarity under NATO proxy supervision at the first available
opportunity.
So what message does Gaddafi's fate send to
Tehran, even though the US Defense Secretary told the Senate Armed
Services Committee on 16 February that Iran has not yet made a decision as to whether
to build a nuclear bomb? It seems improbable that Gaddafi would have met his end that way
if he had been nuclear armed. So what greater incentive could there now be to acquire
nuclear weapons for any country that fears NATO? Even if you are a 'friend' of NATO today,
like Gaddafi was, tomorrow you may not be.
As Gorbachev himself points out, with NATO
now completely out of control the rational for rival states, good or evil, to obtain or
expand nuclear arsenals has never been stronger. Attack 'deterrence' is, after all,
the very reason NATO itself is nuclear armed.
In short, these developments risk dragging
the world to the brink of a calamity whose scale many fear will dwarf the earlier
disasters brought to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. Those actions by NATO or its
member states have turned literally millions of people into corpses, cripples,
orphans and refugees (3 million of the latter in Iraq alone).
More are yet to come in Libya as the carnage and anarchy there only now gets truly underway fostered
by the political vacuum that is following on from yet another 'mission accomplished'
prematurely declared to the world by NATO's media management teams. In all of these
interventions the 'humanitarian cure' turns out to be worse than the original disease, as
former NATO Secretary-General Lord Carrington warned
after the bombing of Serbia back in 1999 (the standard narrative still pretends that the
Kosovo campaign was mostly an unmitigated humanitarian success, but it left a dark legacy hovering over the province, the
full scale of which is only now beginning to become fully transparent).
America is the driving force of NATO.
Unfortunately it is an open secret that
the democratic system in America has become so corrupted that it is ill-equipped
to stop all this violence. Gorbachev has previously stated
that the real government of the United States is a 'military-industrial complex', as
indeed former World War II Allied Supreme Commander President Eisenhower himself had warned as far back as 1961.
Today Gorbachev has restated his belief that
the world urgently needs to adopt new thinking. As it happens, quite separately, he
is supported in that conclusion by the Chief Rabbi of Britain.
However, there may not be much time left to
do so.
Both French president Nicholas Sarkozy and a
Chinese General have warned that a direct military confrontation
with Iran risks precipitating world war.
nlpwessex.org |
View RT
Interview With Sibel Edmonds on NATO Covert Backing Of The Syrian Rebels Since May 2011
YouTube - Click Here
(For Partial Transcript - Click Here) |
Sibel Edmonds
Uncovers Major Corruption At The US State Department
Involving Government Officials And Agents From The United States, Turkey, Pakistan
And Israel
Sunday Times, London - Click Here |
"Television
reporting and much print journalism [of the situation in Syria] is skewed towards
portraying an evil government oppressing a heroic people. Evidence
that other forces may be at work is ignored..... As
in Libya last year, the rebels invariably get a positive press. The increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict is understated. Syria is rushing headlong into a
conflict that will tear the country's communities apart."
All the evidence points to sectarian civil war in Syria, but no one wants to admit it
Independent,
12 February 2012
"[T]his
I think is a vicious struggle in fact playing out between the regime and the Arab League
and, beyond, the international community. The regime has much to hide. It has some things
to show. Indeed events on the ground have come much closer to
its narrative. You do have armed groups which are fighting
against the security apparatus. The regime has many losses on a daily basis. You have weapons coming from abroad through
smuggling networks. You have some cash flowing in. Technology, like modems to access the
internet or, satellite phones. So the regime can point to the
conspiracy it has been referring to [for] months."
Peter Harling, Project Director, Middle East Programme,
International Crisis Group
The World Tonight
BBC Radio 4, 2 January 2011 (10.44 -
14:18 mins into broadcast)
Anarchy And Chaos
Coming Soon At A NATO 'Intervention' Site Near You
"There have been reports of hundreds
of American and NATO troops training militants on the Syrian border to overthrow Al-assad's
regime. According to a
former FBI official this has been going on since May 2011. Why are we not hearing about this on American mainstream media? Sibel
Edmonds, president of the National Security Whistle blowers Coalition, exposes what is
going on around Syria."
US and NATO troops train on the Syrian border
RT,
15 December 2011
Cold War
Methods Persist |
"I can tell you that there is a
role in my mind, a proper role, for covert action to continue. And I would not call it 'paramilitary'. I would call it 'pure
covert action'. And that would be things happening to
the benefit of national security that just seem to happen. And there is not an American
flag on them. And if somebody came to the President
of the United States, he would be able to say, 'I don't know what you're talking
about.'"
Porter Goss, former director of the CIA
Ship of Spies
BBC Radio 4, 15 January 2011 |
"These
Nicaraguans dying will be added to the 800,000 I mentioned earlier, the victims - people
who die - as a direct victims of CIA covert action in the last thirty years. The minimum
figure given by all responsible parties and press and government studies..... is 800,000.
The figures range from 800,000 to a couple of million victims of CIA operations. That does
not include, for example, the people [a further two million] who died in the Vietnam war
which was the direct result of a CIA covert action.... Now that's a lot of dead people. Now the circumstances of this killing is pure terrorism:
recruiting terrorists to go across the border and blow up, assassinate, and kill. We have to remember that the next time President Reagan or Alexander
Hague are making their pious statements about the threat of international terrorism, and
the horrors of international terrorism. The United
States is, without any serious competition, leading the world in international terrorism,
today and for the past thirty years.... "
John Stockwell, former CIA station chief in Angola
YouTube
- Alternative Views Interview. May 1982 |
"...the Arab League and its western
backers [have] announce[d] financial and material assistance for insurgents [in Syria]. Their announcement, however, was misleading. For several months now money and arms
have been flowing semi-clandestinely to local militias and the 'Free Syrian Army',
composed of army deserters. Insurgents are, reportedly, being provided with modern weapons
and night-vision and communications equipment, and are being reinforced by veteran fighters from Iraq and Libya, some with al-Qaeda connections. Arming insurgents is certain to prolong the
conflict in Syria and is already transforming what had been campaigning to topple the
regime by means of mass protest into a full-scale civil war that could engulf neighbouring
Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan, and destablise Turkey.... Secular,
Christian and heterodox Shia Alawite Syrians fear their country will become a wasteland
like Iraq, ruled by a sectarian Sunni regime rather than a sectarian Shia one, as in Iraq.
They argue Arab Spring uprisings have been hijacked by the well-organised Muslim
Brotherhood and ultraorthodox Salafis. The latter adhere to the puritanical Wahhabism
practised in Saudi Arabia, the font and financier of militant Sunni fundamentalism. The struggle in Syria is a struggle for the heartland of the 'Mashriq',
the eastern Arab world, seriously weakened by the absence of Iraq since the 2003 US
invasion and occupation. In spite of Syria’s authoritarianism, brutality and
corruption, secular liberal Arab observers insist the regime must be permitted to
facilitate the transition to multiparty rule. They
argue that since there is no obvious successor to the regime, current structures must
remain in place if Syria is to avoid the anarchy and chaos,
murder and mayhem that still afflict Iraq. The
struggle for Syria is becoming increasingly polarised between East and West, with Russia
and China supporting the regime and the US and Europe the opposition.... Since the US
occupation of Iraq, both Russia and China have lost potentially lucrative oil- exploration
contracts in Iraq and have had only marginal regional roles. Arab analysts believe the primary target of the US, the main mover of the western campaign to oust Syria’s
rulers, is Syria’s ally, Tehran."
Uprising will fail but leave lasting divisions, analysts say
Irish
Times, 20 February 2012
Now Even The Telegraph Suspects A Calculated Deception
Over Syria
"David Cameron and William Hague are
at risk of over-simplifying a dangerous and complex situation. When two car bombings
killed nearly 50 people in the heart of the Syrian capital of Damascus just before
Christmas, we in the West were quick to challenge claims made on state TV that the
atrocities had been carried out by al-Qaeda. We were inclined to award more credibility to
the Syrian rebels, who denied that the terror group was involved at all, and insisted that
the attacks had been cynically staged by the government, perhaps as a bid for
international sympathy. However, all doubt ended last week when James Clapper, director of
US national intelligence, informed the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Damascus
bombings 'had all the earmarks of an al-Qaeda attack'. Mr Clapper added that 'we believe
al-Qaeda in Iraq is extending its reach into Syria'. So,
it’s official. Al-Qaeda is acknowledged as an ally of Britain and America in our
desire to overturn the Syrian government. Think about it. Ten years ago, in the wake of
the destruction of the Twin Towers, we invaded Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaeda. Now the
world’s most notorious terror organisation wants to join a new 'coalition of the
willing' in Syria (not just al-Qaeda: yesterday the Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir staged a
march through west London in support of their Syrian brothers and the establishment of the
Khilafah state). This may be the most profound turnaround in global
politics since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 converted Soviet Russia and Nazi
Germany from bitter enemies into allies – and it is important to understand that the
affinity of interests between al-Qaeda and the West extends far beyond Syria. Britain, the
United States and al-Qaeda also have a deep, structural hostility to President
Assad’s biggest sponsor, Iran. Like al-Qaeda, we are interested in undermining Hamas
in Gaza and Hezbollah in the Lebanon. In Libya, David
Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy threw their weight behind the destruction of Gaddafi’s
government and its replacement by a new regime which reportedly embraces
al-Qaeda-connected figures....Washington never
ceases to complain about the connection between the Pakistani intelligence services and
the Taliban. But we never hear a whisper of concerns about the connection between Saudi
intelligence and Salafi movements across the Middle East, of which al-Qaeda is the best
known offshoot...... The situation could hardly be more dangerous or more complex. Yet, in recent public pronouncements David Cameron has repeatedly
spoken of the conflict in Syria as a struggle between an illegal and autocratic regime at
war with what he likes to call 'the people'. Either he is poorly briefed, or he is coming dangerously close to a calculated deception of the British public..... Meanwhile, in Libya there are
menacing signs that last year’s Anglo-French intervention is starting to go wrong.
The toppling of the Gaddafi regime has not brought an end to
the killing. If anything, the
fighting appears to be getting worse, as the country breaks
into hostile armed fractions – a fertile hunting ground for al-Qaeda, our latest collaborator in the war
on terror."
Syria's crisis is leading us to unlikely bedfellows
Telegraph,
18 February 2012
Lord Carrington - 'I Think It Is A Great Mistake To
Intervene In A Civil War'
(To Say Nothing Of Secretly Fomenting One?)
"Nato strikes on Serbia caused, rather than prevented,
ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, says Nato's former Secretary-General and former UK
Foreign Secretary, Lord
Carrington.... He
said [in an article in The Daily Telegraph in March] that often, the wisest thing was to
do nothing... in the Saga interview, published on
Friday, Lord Carrington openly accuses Nato governments of
creating the mass exodus of Kosovo Albanians....
'I think the bombing did cause the ethnic cleansing. What we did made things very much worse. I think it is a great mistake to intervene
in a civil war,'.."
Ex-Nato chief criticises Kosovo Campaign
BBC Online, 26 August 1999
How To Guarantee The Very Thing You Are Trying To Prevent
"President George W. Bush's
administration concluded that a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would be a
bad idea -- and would only make it harder to prevent
Iran from going nuclear in the future, former CIA
and National Security Agency (NSA) chief Gen. Michael Hayden said Thursday. 'When we talked about this in the government, the consensus was that
[attacking Iran] would guarantee that which we are trying to
prevent -- an Iran that
will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret,' Hayden
told a small group of experts and reporters at an event hosted by the Center for the National Interest. Hayden
served as director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and then served as CIA director from 2006
until February 2009. He also had a 39-year career at the Air Force, which he ended as a
four-star general.... Could we go back to July 2009 and see where that could have led?' he
said, referring to the Green Movement protests that raged through Iran then but ultimately
failed to alter the regime's course. 'It's not so much that we don't want Iran to have a
nuclear capacity, it's that we don't want this Iran to have it ... Slow it down long enough and maybe the character [of the Iranian
government] changes.'"
Bush’s CIA director: We determined attacking Iran was a bad idea
Foreign
Policy, 19 January 2012
"If Israel were to bomb Iran, it woud
probably find that the most important facilities had already been secured in impenetrable
underground bunkers.... The only sure way to prevent the ayatollahs from getting their
hands on a nuclear weapon would be to invade Irran and occupy it indefinately with
millions of ground troups, as General Martin Dempsey, the US Chief of Staff, admitted in
congressional testimony last week. If this is so, a nuclear-armed Iran may be one of those
insoluable problems that Israel and the world simply have to learn to live with - just as
South Korea and Japan have learnt to live with their even more belligerent nuclear-armed
nieghbour in Pyongyang... So how would its
[Israel's]vital interests be affected by attacking Iran? The anwer is catastrophically.... an Israeli
attack would almost cetainly precipitate a much wider Middle East conflict..... it would
enormously boost the Islamist and fanatical groups now vying with more pro-Western forces
to dominate the region, especially in Israel's menacingly powerful neighbours, Egypt,
Syria and Iraq. Israel, with a population of only seven milllion, woud proclaim by its
actions that it considers the hundreds of millions of Muslims living around it as
permanent and implacable military enemies. It is this attitude, for more than any nuclear
programme, that poses the real 'existential threat' to Israel's long-term survival."
Anatole Kaletsky - Nucear Iran need not mean Middle East War
London Times, 22 February, Print Edtion, P23
"We are hearing a new concept these
days in discussions about Iran — the zone
of immunity. The idea, often
explained by Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, is that soon Iran will have
enough nuclear capability that Israel would not be able to inflict a crippling blow to its
program. In fact, while the specifics are fresh, this is not a new strategic concept at
all. Nations have often believed that they face a
closing window to act, and almost always such thinking has led to disaster. The most famous example, of course, was Germany’s decision to start
what became World War I. The German General Staff believed that Russia — its archenemy
— was rearming on a scale that would soon nullify Germany’s superior military
strength. The Germans believed that within two years — by 1916 — Russia would
have a significant, and perhaps unbeatable, strategic advantage. As a result, when
turmoil began in the Balkans in June 1914, Germany decided to act while it had the
advantage. To stop Russia from entering a 'zone of immunity,' Germany invaded France
(Russia’s main ally) and Belgium, which forced British entry into the war, thus setting in motion a two-front European war that lasted four
years and resulted in more than 37 million casualties.....
it is profoundly shortsighted to base a major
decision — to go to war — on narrow technical considerations like windows of
vulnerability. Many in Washington in March 2003
insisted that we could not wait for nuclear inspectors to keep at their work in Iraq
because we faced a closing window — the weather was going to get too hot by June and
July to send in U.S. forces. As a result, we rushed into a badly planned military invasion
and occupation in which soldiers had to endure combat in Iraq for nine long and very hot
years. ..... Israeli officials explain that we Americans cannot understand their fears,
that Iran is an existential threat to them. But in fact we can understand because we have
gone through a very similar experience ourselves. After World
War II, as the Soviet Union approached a nuclear
capability, the United States was seized by a panic that lasted for years. Everything that Israel says about Iran now, we said about the
Soviet Union. We saw it as a radical, revolutionary
regime, opposed to every value we held dear, determined to overthrow the governments of
the Western world in order to establish global communism. We saw Moscow as irrational,
aggressive and utterly unconcerned with human life. After all, Joseph Stalin had just
sacrificed a mind-boggling 26 million Soviet lives in his country’s struggle against
Nazi Germany. Just as Israel is openly considering
preemptive strikes against Iran, many in the West urged such strikes against Moscow in the
late 1940s. The calls came not just from hawks but
even from lifelong pacifists such as the public intellectual Bertrand Russell..... In the end, however, the global revolutionaries in Moscow, the mad
autocrats in Pyongyang and the terrorist-supporting military in Pakistan have all been
deterred by mutual fears of destruction. While the Iranian regime is often called crazy,
it has done much less to merit the term than did a regime such as Mao’s China. Over
the past decade, there have been thousands of suicide bombings by Saudis, Egyptians,
Lebanese, Palestinians and Pakistanis, but not been a single suicide attack by an Iranian.
Is the Iranian regime — even if it got one crude device in a few years — likely to launch the first?"
How history lessons could deter Iranian aggression
Washington
Post, 16 February 2012
What's Really Going On
In The Syrian Crisis?
Target Iran
"Both sides [in the Syrian conflict]
have become more violent in recent months, and as the protests drag on, al Assad is
becoming less willing to compromise.... Israel is in the meantime using psychological
warfare and propaganda in its attempts to affect al Assad’s undoing. It calculates that a Sunni regime hostile to Israel is preferable to an Iranian ally serving as a key link in a
Shiite arc stretching to Lebanon. ...Should al Assad’s regime survive, the biggest regional winner will be
Iran. Syria’s already close
alliance with Tehran will be
strengthened should the regime persevere."
Syria's Al Assad Digs In Against Opponents
STRATFOR,
11 January 2012
The Syrian Uprising Is Not As
'Spontaneous' As It Looks
America's Destabilisation Programme Against Assad Has Been Running Since 2006 On
The Same Lines As Similar Efforts In Iran
"The White House has been reported to have secretly stepped up covert operations inside Iran with the aim of
destablising its leadership. President George W Bush requested and received funding of $400 million
(£200 million) for the plan after he made a secret appeal to Congressional leaders last
year. The money is likely to be used for operations carried out by the CIA and other
intelligence agencies, according to the New Yorker magazine. The appeal for funds 'was focused on undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions
and trying to undermine the government through regime change' said the magazine. A source
cited the contents of the appeal - known as a Presidential Finding - as involving 'working
with opposition groups and passing money'.... John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations and a leading
foreign policy hawk, told The Daily Telegraph last week that he believed the Bush
administration had ruled out military action but that it
might acquiesce in Israeli air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. The magazine said the move by Mr
Bush represented a 'major escalation' in the 'scale and the scope of the operations in Iran' intended to foment dissent against the The Tehran
regime, which has made little attempt to convince
the world that its nuclear ambitions are purely peaceful. Washington suspects Iran is
secretly working to build an atomic weapons arsenal. Iran insists its nuclear activities
are for civilian energy purposes."
George W Bush 'raised $400 million for action against Iran'
Daily
Telegraph, 30 June 2008
"The State
Department has secretly
financed Syrian political opposition groups and
related projects, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming
into the country, according to previously undisclosed diplomatic cables. The London-based
satellite channel, Barada TV, began broadcasting in April 2009 but has ramped up
operations to cover the mass
protests in Syria as part of a long-standing campaign to overthrow the country’s
autocratic leader, Bashar al-Assad. Human rights groups say scores
of people have been killed by Assad’s security forces since the demonstrations
began March 18; Syria has blamed the violence on 'armed gangs.' Barada TV is closely
affiliated with the Movement for Justice and Development, a London-based network of Syrian
exiles. Classified U.S. diplomatic cables show that
the State Department has funneled as much as $6 million to the group since 2006 to operate the satellite channel
and finance other activities inside Syria. The channel is named after the Barada River, which courses through the
heart of Damascus, the Syrian capital. The U.S. money for Syrian opposition figures began
flowing under President George W. Bush after he effectively froze political ties with
Damascus in 2005. The financial backing has continued under President Obama, even as his
administration sought to rebuild relations with Assad. In January, the White House posted
an ambassador to Damascus for the first time in six years. The cables, provided by the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks, show that U.S.
Embassy officials in Damascus became worried in 2009 when they learned that Syrian
intelligence agents were raising questions about U.S. programs. Some embassy officials
suggested that the State Department reconsider its involvement, arguing that it could put
the Obama administration’s rapprochement with Damascus at risk. Syrian authorities 'would undoubtedly view any U.S. funds going to
illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change,' read an
April 2009 cable signed by the top-ranking U.S. diplomat in Damascus at the time. 'A
reassessment of current U.S.-sponsored programming that supports anti-[government]
factions, both inside and outside Syria, may prove productive,' the cable said. It is
unclear whether the State Department is still funding Syrian opposition groups, but the
cables indicate money was set aside at least through September 2010. While some of that
money has also supported programs and dissidents inside Syria, The Washington Post is
withholding certain names and program details at the request of the State Department,
which said disclosure could endanger the recipients’ personal safety."
U.S. secretly backed Syrian opposition groups, cables released by WikiLeaks show
Washington
Post, 18 April 2011
The Militarisation Of These Covert Operations In Syria
Began In 2011
"NATO
is already clandestinely engaged in the Syrian conflict, with Turkey taking the lead
as U.S. proxy. ...... Unmarked NATO
warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to
Iskenderum on the Syrian border, delivering weapons from the
late Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals as well as volunteers from the Libyan Transitional
National Council who are experienced in pitting local volunteers against trained soldiers,
a skill they acquired confronting Gaddafi’s army. Iskenderum is also the seat of the Free
Syrian Army, the armed wing of the Syrian National
Council. French and British special forces trainers are on the ground, assisting the
Syrian rebels while the CIA and U.S. Spec Ops are providing communications equipment and
intelligence to assist the rebel cause, enabling the fighters to avoid concentrations of
Syrian soldiers. ...... Syrian government claims that it is being assaulted by rebels who
are armed, trained, and financed by foreign governments are more true than false."
Philip
Giraldi, former senior CIA officer, whose career postings included Turkey
NATO vs. Syria
The American
Conservative, 19 December 2011
Amongst The
Peaceful Protests Others Are Trying To Import Violence Into Syria
Who Are They? |
"[T]his I think is a vicious struggle in fact playing out between the
regime and the Arab League and, beyond, the international community. The regime has much
to hide. It has some things to show. Indeed events on the
ground have come much closer to its narrative. You do have
armed groups which are fighting against the security apparatus. The regime has many losses
on a daily basis. You have weapons coming from abroad through smuggling networks. You have some cash flowing in. Technology,
like modems to access the internet or, satellite phones. So
the regime can point to the conspiracy it has been referring to [for] months. ....... I think it's crucial... for
the regime to realise that it cannot put an end to the protest movement through sheer
force, as it's been attempting to for several months now. Initially it was resorting to a
mix of concessions, promises and repression. Now it's all out repression. And it's not
working. It will push society to the brink and could lead Syria into a large scale civil war if
this goes on for several more weeks or months."
Peter Harling, Project Director, Middle East Programme,
International Crisis Group
The World Tonight
BBC Radio 4, 2 January 2011 (10.44 -
14:18 mins into broadcast)
"The Syrian uprising will eventually
succeed in ousting President Bashar Assad, a diplomat told The Daily Star, adding that United States is secretly providing aid to the Syrian opposition.... Walid
Maalouf...served as alternate representative for the U.S. to the General Assembly of
the United Nations in 2003 and maintains close ties with the U.S. administration...
Maalouf said the doors of the White House and Congress are open to officials from the
Syrian expatriate community, most of whom are supportive of the SNC, adding that the U.S. is secretly providing aid to the opposition,
though he did not specify whether this support was financial or military."
U.S. providing secret aid to Syria opposition: diplomat
Daily
Star (Lebanon), 20 February 2012 |
"My sources
.... are US military sources and Turkish military sources familiar with the training
of Syrian rebels in Turkey ... in US base, Incirlik base, in the southern part of
Turkey... since last May .... And this story
was confirmed by several high level people from both sides, Turkish military and US
military. And we broke this story [on a web
site] in November, on November 22nd, and no one in the US media has reported on this, even
though a week later this story was confirmed, and it was publicised by major newspapers in
Turkey.... My sources told me that ...
end of September/early October they have gone to the New York
Times, and Washington Post, and the New Yorker ... and the editors there they said they were not going to cover this
angle.... as
far as the trainers are concerned these are the Turkish arm of NATO and US military and
intelligence personnel who've been working with [defector] Colonel
Riad al-Assad. He has been in Turkey since May
2011... inside the [US] base they have had this
division to train the rebels there. They also help the rebels smuggle arms into Syria.
But also they have a communication division there in order to actually increase the
number of defectors from the current Syrian army..... a lot of these activities have to do
with the 'information wars', and that was to spread propaganda in Syria, to also help ...
the rebels who carry the messages and publicity crafted, created, by the Turkish/US NATO
forces inside Turkey.... I have Turkish military
sources who actually have been unhappy about these developments. .... after we broke [it] this story was confirmed
by all the major networks and newspapers in Turkey starting at the end of November. So they had their own sources .... And actually some of them had
photographed the former military members from Assad's regime in southern Turkey... being
trained with US military personnel... so if you were to go and look at the archives,
Turkish newspapers have been reporting on this. No reports
from the US media. ..... And this is exactly what
they did with us with Iraq. Similar incidents took
place during Libya, and now, since May, they have been helping the US government to
cover-up these set-up, these preparations, these activities starting May 2011. Because most people here in
the US, they are under this impression that things are reactionary: Assad's regime is
bringing about some atrocities and some rebels there, they are going out fighting. They
have no idea that all these set-ups and preps started in May
2011. So it is by design, and it's not some kind of simultaneously uprising situation where people
are rebelling and then suddenly they are mysteriously armed and mysteriously arms are
being smuggled into Syria from Turkey. Well, who's
providing these arms? Nobody's asking in the US media? Well,
these are US arms shipped to Turkey. And from Turkey
it's being smuggled into Syria."
Sibel Edmonds - Former FBI Turkic languages specialist
RT,
15 December 2011
Who Are
STRATFOR, Philip Giraldi, And Sibel Edmonds (Above)?
Sibel Edmonds in the Sunday Times - Click
Here
STRATFOR in the Guardian - Click
Here
Philip Giraldi biography - Click
Here |
Who
Are STRATFOR?
"Hackers who stole
thousands of credit card numbers from U.S. security firm Stratfor have now published the email addresses of more than 860,000 of its
clients.The loose-knit Anonymous movement released the data - which included information
on former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger - online.... People working
for big corporations, the U.S. military and major defence contractors were all contained
on lists stolen from the intelligence company often dubbed
the Shadow CIA.... In a posting on the data-sharing
website pastebin.com, the hackers said the list included information from about 75,000
customers of Stratfor and about 860,000 people who had registered to use its site. It said that included some 50,000 email addresses belonging to the
U.S. government's .gov and .mil domains. The list
also included addresses at contractors including BAE Systems Plc, Boeing Co, Lockheed
Martin Corp and several U.S. government-funded labs that conduct classified research in
Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Idaho Falls, Idaho; and Sandia and Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Corporations on the list included Bank of America, Exxon Mobil Corp, Goldman Sachs &
Co and Thomson Reuters."
Anonymous strikes again: Hackers publish email addresses and passwords of 860,000 clients
of shadowy U.S. security firm
Mail,
2 January 2012 |
Arming The Jihadists In Syria
"Russia’s
foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, warned Wednesday that outside encouragement of
antigovernment uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa could lead to 'a very big war
that will cause suffering not only to countries in the region, but also to states far
beyond its boundaries.' Mr. Lavrov’s annual news conference was largely devoted to a
critique of Western policies in Iran
and Syria,
which he said could lead to a spiral of violence. .... Mr. Lavrov said Russia would use
its position on the United Nations Security Council to veto any United Nations
authorization of military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad of
Syria. 'If someone conceives the idea of using force at any cost — and I’ve
already heard calls for sending some Arab troops to Syria — we are unlikely to be
able to prevent this,' Mr. Lavrov said. 'But this should be done on their own initiative
and should remain on their conscience. They won’t get any authorization from the
Security Council.' Mr. Lavrov said foreign
governments were arming 'militants and extremists' in Syria... Mr. Lavrov offered a
similarly grave message about the possibility of a
military strike against Iran, which he said would be a 'catastrophe.' He said sanctions now being proposed against Tehran were 'intended to
have a smothering effect on the Iranian economy and the Iranian population, probably in
the hopes of provoking discontent.'"
Russian Says Western Support for Arab Revolts Could Cause a ‘Big War’
New
York Times, 18 January 2012
"The
Iraqi branch of al Qaida, seeking to exploit the bloody turmoil in Syria to reassert its
potency, carried out two recent bombings in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and likely was
behind suicide bombings Friday that killed at least 28 people in the largest city, Aleppo,
U.S. officials told McClatchy. The officials cited
U.S. intelligence reports on the incidents, which appear
to verify Syrian President Bashar Assad's charges of al Qaida involvement in the 11-month uprising against his rule. ."
U.S. officials: Al Qaida behind Syria bombings
McClatchy
Newspapers, 10 February 2012
"... a
McClatchy report quoted unnamed American intelligence
officials as saying that the Iraqi node of the global jihadist network carried out two
attacks against Syrian intelligence facilities in Damascus, while Iraqi Deputy Interior
Minister Adnan al-Assadi said in a recent interview with AFP that Iraqi jihadists were
moving fighters and weapons into neighboring Syria.....[One]
option [for al Qaeda in the Middle East] has been to try to take advantage of power
vacuums that were created by other forces. Iraq presented one such opportunity when U.S.
forces ousted the Baathist regime in 2003, allowing for the emergence of al Qaeda's
then-most active node. In Iraq, the country's Shiite majority posed a daunting obstacle to
the jihadists even before the jihadists alienated their Iraqi Sunni allies to the point
that they began siding with the Americans, which led to a degradation of the jihadist
network in Iraq. By contrast, post-Gadhafi Libya,
with its proliferation of militias - some of which have both Islamist and jihadist
tendencies - could become a more welcoming place for jihadists. But even if Libya were to descend into Islamist militancy, geography
would most likely prevent it from spreading too far beyond Libya's borders. However, given
Syria's strategic location at the crossroads of so many key geopolitical fault lines, the
meltdown of the Syrian state could easily result in a regional conflict. Most stakeholders
oppose foreign military intervention in Syria for this very reason. Many states are eyeing the strategic goal of weakening Iran geopolitically
through the ouster of the Alawite regime in Syria, but even that prospect may not be
enough to offset the potential costs.....With or without foreign intervention, jihadists in the region have
ample room for maneuver in Syria. The most significant regional jihadist presence lies
across the Syrian border in Iraq. These forces benefited from Damascus' decision to back
Sunni insurgents from 2003 to 2007. The consolidation of Shiite power in Iraq greatly
weakened these forces. Now that Syria is unraveling and armed resistance to the regime is
shaping up, the jihadist flow is reversing direction, with jihadists now entering Syria
from Iraq...... Regional stakeholders are reluctant to see foreign military intervention, leaving the option of covert support in the
form of supplying weapons to the Syrian rebels. Jihadists can be expected to make use of
such covert support as they work to insert themselves in
Syria. But while neither the domestic opponents of
the Syrian regime nor the international stakeholders have an interest in seeing Syria
collapse into sectarian conflict, jihadists want just that. The jihadists could well
succeed in sparking a regional sectarian conflict that would involve multiple state and
non-state actors and would see Iran and Saudi Arabia locked in an intense proxy war.
Western or Israeli involvement in the conflict would please the jihadists even more. It is therefore in the jihadists' interest to thwart a negotiated
settlement in Syria. Though it is still unclear who
was responsible for the Dec. 23, 2011, and Jan. 6 suicide attacks targeting Syrian
intelligence, they served the jihadists' purpose as they forced the regime to crack down
even harder on opponents (both armed and unarmed). As the rebels and their supporters
respond in kind, the jihadists can thus instigate a cycle of violence leading to an
intensely polarized environment. The net result of such a process could be a meltdown of
the Syrian state and the rise of multiple armed factions, including jihadists. The collapse of the Syrian state in turn would allow the jihadists
a wide arena in which to operate, stretching from Lebanon to Iraq and putting them very
close to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories -- the best theater a jihadist
could ask for. The Syrian upheaval takes place at a
time of heightened geopolitical and sectarian tensions in the region, where Iran and its
largely Arab Shiite allies are seeking to make inroads into the largely Sunni Arab
countries. For Tehran and its main non-state proxy, the Lebanese Shiite Islamist group
Hezbollah, the survival of an Alawite regime in Syria that owes its survival to Iran is
critical....Just how the many moving parts in this dynamic interact will determine the
extent to which Syria and its environs become a jihadist playground. A potential collapse of the Syrian state greatly increases the
risk of a regional sectarian war that al Qaeda could greatly benefit from."
Jihadist Opportunities in Syria
STRATFOR, 14
February 2012
Cold War Methods Persist
Western Covert Action And 'Plausible Deniability' Are Now Being Deployed Against
Syria
"I can tell you that there is a
role in my mind, a proper role, for covert action to continue. And I would not call it 'paramilitary'. I would call it 'pure
covert action'. And that would be things happening to
the benefit of national security that just seem to happen. And there is not an American
flag on them. And if somebody came to the President
of the United States, he would be able to say, 'I don't know what you're talking
about.'"
Porter Goss, former director of the CIA
Ship of Spies
BBC Radio 4, 15 January 2011 |
'Deniability' And The Role Of Colonel Riad Al-Assad In
The Conflict In Syria
"[Syrian
defector] Col. Riad al-Assad has
been in Turkey, working with U.S. & NATO, right inside the US Incirlik Base in Turkey,
to do exactly what he vehemently denies: smuggle US weapons into Syria, participate in US
psychological and information warfare inside Syria as the middle-man whom Syrian
protesters tend to trust, and help with funneling intelligence and military operators
across the border and night-time drop offs by air. The joint US-NATO secret training camp
in the US air force base in Incirlik, Turkey, began operations in April- May 2011 to
organize and expand the dissident base in Syria.
Since then, in addition to Col. Riad al-Assad, several other high-ranking Syrian military
and intelligence officials have been added to operations’ headquarters in the US
base. Weekly weapons smuggling operations have been carried out with full NATO-US
participation since last May. The HQ also includes an information warfare division where
US-NATO crafted communications are directed to dissidents in Syria via the core group of
Syrian military and Intelligence defectors."
Sibel Edmonds, former FBI Turkic languages specialist
'Boiling
Frogs' Web Site (run by Sibel Edmonds), 21 November 2012
"In the
Dec. 8 Security Weekly, we discussed the covert
intelligence war being waged by the United States, Israel and other U.S. allies
against Iran. Their efforts are directed not only against Tehran’s nuclear program
but also against Iran’s
ability to establish an arc of influence that stretches through Iraq, Syria and
Lebanon. To that end, the United States and its allies are trying to limit Iran’s
influence in Iraq and to constrain Hezbollah in Lebanon. But apparently they are also
exploring ways to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a longtime ally of Iran....
As we examine some of the actions available.... we should keep in mind that the steps are
not at all static; there can be much latitude for action within each step. For example,
training provided by mercenaries or the CIA’s Special Activities Division is far more
low-key, and therefore easier to deny, than training provided by the U.S. Army’s Special Forces......o
utside governments often take opposition fighters to a third country for training. This is
because of the difficulty involved with training inside the home country, which is
controlled by a hostile government that rightfully views the opposition as a threat. Already we are seeing signs that this is happening with the training of
FSA members in Turkey. The next step beyond training and intelligence-sharing is to provide the
opposition with funding and other support, which can include food, uniforms, communication
equipment, medical assistance and even weapons. To restate a point, providing funding is
not as aggressive as providing weapons to the opposition, so there is a great deal of
latitude within this level. When providing weapons,
an outside government will usually try to supply opposition forces with arms native to
their country. This is done to maintain deniability of assistance."
The Syria Crisis: Assessing Foreign Intervention
STRATFOR,
15 December 2011
'Deniable'
Operations And NATO Proxies In Syria |
"According to a report by Israeli intelligence
outfit DebkaFile
British Special Forces are on the ground in Syria directing rebel fighters in a repeat of
how Libyan rebels were aided in the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi. DEBKAfile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources were quoted
as saying that foreign units are not engaging in direct combat but are acting in an
advisory capacity, while also relaying requests for arms outside of the country. The report claimed that British and Qatari special operations units are
operating with rebel forces under cover in the
Syrian city of Homs 162 kilometers from Damascus. The report suggested that the situation
in Syria is developing in an almost identical manner to how rebels in Libya were aided by
British and French Special Forces. The report added
that the same Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists who fought U.S. troops in Iraq and helped NATO powers overthrow Colonel
Gaddafi were airlifted into Syria to aid rebels there in attempting to topple President Bashar al-Assad in November last year. Meanwhile The
British Telegraph reported that former terrorist turned Libyan rebel leader Abdulhakim Belhadj, now head of the Tripoli
Military Council, 'met with Free Syrian Army leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey,' after being sent there by Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the interim Libyan
president. Belhadj is the former front man for the Libyan
Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), designated as a terrorist
organization by the US State Department. Belhadj was captured by the CIA in Malaysia in 2003 and extradited to
Libya where Colonel Gaddafi had him imprisoned. Belhadj is a committed jihadist who fought
with the Taliban against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Libyan rebel leader Abdel-Hakim
al-Hasidi admitted that Belhadj’s LIFG fighters were the second-largest cohort of
foreign fighters in Iraq"
British Special Forces in Syria
Pakistan Observer, 11 February
2012
"British and Qatari special
operations units are operating with rebel forces under cover in the Syrian city of Homs
just 162 kilometers from Damascus, according to debkafile’s exclusive military and
intelligence sources. The foreign troops are not
engaged in direct combat with the Syrian forces bombarding different parts of Syria's
third largest city of 1.2 million. They are tactical advisers, manage rebel communications
lines and relay their requests for arms, ammo, fighters and logistical aid to outside suppliers, mostly in Turkey. This site is the first to
report the presence of foreign military forces in any of the Syrian uprising's embattled
areas. Our sources report the two foreign contingents have set up four centers of
operation - in the northern Homs district of Khaldiya, Bab Amro in the east, and Bab Derib
and Rastan in the north. Each district is home to about a quarter of a million
people....The British-Qatari troop presence in Homs was at the center of Assad's talks in
Damascus Tuesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian SVR intelligence
chief Mikhail Fradkov.... their conversation focused on more violence, namely, Assad's
plans for his next assault on rebels and protesters and his military response to the rising covert presence of foreign Western, Arab and Muslim
troops in Syria."
First foreign troops in Syria back Homs rebels. Damascus and Moscow at odds
DEBKAFile, 8 February 2012
"Over
10,000 Libyans are reportedly being trained in a closed-off zone in Jordan, before being
snuck into Syria to fight for the opposition. These
men are allegedly paid around US$1,000 a month, funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Jordan-based AlBawaba news website says most
of the gunmen who are being trained are actually part of the Libyan armed opposition, who
have not had the chance to lay down arms following the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi’s
regime. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, post-war Libya,
Turkey, Israel – this list of countries drawn into conspiracy media speculation would
be incomplete without recent remarks from the Russian Foreign Ministry. British MI6 agents have entered the Syrian ground, the Ministry said on
Friday. This is the first time such a declaration has come
from a ministry. The
media have been boiling with reports on foreign Special Forces training the Syrian
opposition since November. Thus, the Israeli DEBKAfile reported that British and Qatari
commandos are instructing the Syrian opposition and supplying them with arms. The French
weekly Le Canard Enchaine and Turkish daily Milliyet revealed the presence of French
intelligence in the region, also instructing the Free Syrian Army in urban guerrilla
techniques. These camps were located in Libya’s Tripoli, southern Turkey and northern
Lebanon, read the reports."
Made in Jordan: Thousands of gunmen preparing to enter Syria?
RT, 21 February 2012
How The British-Qatari Covert
Operation Was Done In Libya
"The BBC understands about 10 UK
officers and a similar number from France will provide logistics and intelligence training
in Benghazi. UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said the move was in accordance with the
resolution on Libya, which forbids foreign occupation
forces.... Mr Hague stressed the officers being sent
to the eastern rebel stronghold of Benghazi would not be involved in any fighting....
The officers will be wearing civilian
clothing, not uniforms..."
British military officers to be sent to Libya
BBC Online, 19 April 2011
"British
efforts to help topple Colonel Gaddafi were not limited to air strikes. On the ground -
and on the quiet - special forces soldiers were blending in with rebel fighters. The British campaign to overthrow
Muammar Gaddafi's regime had its public face - with aircraft dropping bombs, or Royal Navy ships appearing in Libyan
waters, but it also had a secret aspect.
My investigations into that covert effort reveal a story
of practically minded people trying to get on with the job, while all the time facing
political and legal constraints imposed from London. In the end, though, British special
forces were deployed on the ground in order to help the UK's allies - the Libyan
revolutionaries often called the National Transitional Council or NTC. Those with a
knowledge of the programme insist 'they did a tremendous job' and contributed to the final
collapse of the Gaddafi regime. ... At a meeting near the end of March, we have been told,
authorisation was given to take certain steps to develop the NTC's embryonic ground
forces. This involved the immediate dispatch of a small advisory team, and the longer-term
development of a 'train and equip' project. Ministers were advised, say those familiar with the discussion,
that this second part of the plan would take at least three months to implement.... France
was to prove more forward-leaning than the UK in this, and by August was providing weapons to NTC
units in the Nefusa mountains of western Libya..... While
France and Qatar were ready to provide weapons directly, the UK was not. However, this made little practical difference
since the SAS was operating closely with Qatar special forces who had reportedly delivered items such as Milan anti-tank missiles. ... The SAS had meanwhile strayed beyond its training facility, with
single men or pairs accompanying the NTC commanders that they had been training back to
their units. They dressed as Libyans and blended in with the units they mentored, says someone familiar with
the operation....When, on 20 October, Gaddafi was
finally captured and then killed by NTC men, it followed Nato
air strikes on a convoy of vehicles carrying leading members
of the former regime as they tried to escape from Sirte early in the morning. Had British soldiers on the ground had a hand in this? Nobody will say yet. In keeping
with its long standing policies on special forces and MI6 operations, Whitehall has
refrained from public statements about the nature of assistance on the ground....Last
October the Chief of the Qatar Defence Staff revealed that 'hundreds' of his troops has
been on the ground in Libya....As for Britain's decision finally to deploy an SAS
squadron, 'they made a fantastic difference', argues one insider. It is part of the essence of troops of this kind that they often
operate in secrecy, providing their political masters with policy options that they might
not wish to own up to publicly. But given that the
UK's earlier relationship with Col Gaddafi and his intelligence services caused great
embarrassment, it could be that attention will one day focus more closely on British
assistance to the NTC, particularly if the Libyan revolution comes unstuck.'"
Mark Urban - Inside story of the UK's secret mission to beat Gaddafi
BBC Online, 19 January 2012
The Syrian Free Army - Only Partly Army Defectors?
"The FSA partly relies on defections from Assad's army because it does not accept civilians
in its ranks..."
'We live in fear of a massacre'
Sunday Times, 19 February, Print Edition, P19
Q: So Who Are The Rest In The FSA ('Free Syrian Army) If They
Are Not Syrian Civilians?
A: The Libyan Model (Imported Foreign Forces Dressed As
Locals) Is Being Used In Syria
Minus The Air-Cover Which Has Been Blocked By Russia And China Who Are Angry About
Having Been Duped Into Believing They Were Signing Up To A Humanitarian Operation In Libya
When In fact It Was A Regime Change Operation |
Stage II - Preparing To Move From Covert To Overt
Operations In The Fomenting Of A Syrian Civil War
As The Clock Ticks Against Iran And 'Friends Of Syria' Prepare To Destroy Assad
As Happened To Libya Under A Regime Change Mission Hiding Under The Clothes Of A
So-Called 'Responsibility To Protect' Fraud
"The
Obama administration opened the door slightly Tuesday to international military assistance
for Syria's rebels, with officials saying new
tactics may have to be explored if President Bashar Assad continues to defy pressure to
halt a brutal crackdown on dissenters. In coordinated messages, the White House
and State
Department said they still hope for a political solution. But faced with the daily
onslaught by the Assad regime against Syrian civilians, officials dropped the
administration's previous strident opposition to arming anti-regime forces. It remained
unclear, though, what, if any, role the U.S. might play in providing such aid.... Other officials said discussions are now under way about adding a military
component to a package of humanitarian and political aid to the opposition that's to be
discussed at a major international conference on Syria this week in Tunisia. More than 70
countries have been invited to meet Friday in Tunisia for a 'Friends
of Syria' meeting....
The backdrop to the discussions is the increasing fear that Syria could descend into an
all-out civil war [which is even more likely if America does this]."
Obama administration opens door to aid for Syrian rebels
Associated
Press, 21 February 2012
"Russia said today that it would not
attend a planned 'friends of Syria' meeting this week because its organisers haven't invited Syrian
government representatives. Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said the
meeting in Tunisia 'looks like an attempt to forge
some kind of international coalition as it was with the setting-up of a 'contact group'
for Libya.'"
Russia: 'We won't go to Syria summit'
Morning
Star, 21 Februay 2012
"Libya’s
leader acknowledged Tuesday that his transitional government is powerless to control
militias that are refusing to lay down their arms after ousting Moammar Gadhafi as it
struggles to impose control over the oil-rich North African nation. ...
Abdul-Jalil said the governing National Transitional Council has made mistakes, but he
also criticized former rebels who have formed
powerful militias and
local governments that have emerged as rivals to the Tripoli-based central government that
assumed power after Gadhafi was ousted. 'Both are to blame,' he said. 'The governmental
program to integrate the militias is slow and the revolutionaries don’t trust
it....the country has been plagued by revenge attacks by those who suffered at the hands
of Gadhafi’s forces during the brutal civil war. Human rights groups have documented
reports of widespread torture and killings of detainees. Hundreds
of armed militias that fought against Gadhafi’s forces are the real power on the
ground in the country, wielding control over cities,
neighborhoods and borders while the transitional government has been unable to rein in
fighters, rebuild decimated institutions or stop widespread corruption.”
Libyan leader acknowledges government is powerless to control militias
Associated
Press, 21 February 2012
The Syrians Do Not Want Civil War
But They Are Now Faced With One As A Result Of A Covert 'Iran-Contra' Cold War Type
Destabilisation Operation
"The
[Reagan] administration would sell arms to Iran and divert the proceeds to the Contras. Since both ends of the operation were highly illegal - Iran was also
under a US arms embargo - it had to be secret.... But
... later the Nicaraguans shot down a CIA supply plane. A month after that, a Lebanese
newspaper reported Reagan's arms deals with Iran. A frenzy of shredding and the
destruction of emails broke out, and it took a congressional investigation - during which Poindexter, Elliott Abrams, Caspar Weinberger, Colin Powell
(now [2003] secretary of state) and Richard Armitage (now [2003] deputy secretary of
state) lied - and a
specially appointed independent counsel to get the full story. By then, though, as the
independent counsel reported, the administration's web of deceit had achieved its
objectives - to protect Reagan, vice-president George Bush and the rest from the
consequences of their conspiracy. As the independent counsel put it, Poindexter and North
were made 'the scapegoats whose sacrifice would protect the Reagan administration in its
final two years'.... Poindexter, North and two others were indicted on 23 counts of
conspiracy to defraud the US and Poindexter was convicted on five felony counts of
conspiracy, false statements, destruction and removal of records and obstruction of
Congress. Elliott Abrams later pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress.
George Bush senior pardoned him; and Bush junior appointed him director of the National
Security Council's office for democracy, human rights and international operations and
then to his current job as director of Middle East affairs in the White House. The wars these men promoted had left 75,000 dead in El Salvador
and 30,000-40,000 dead in Nicaragua, not to mention many thousands dead in Guatemala and
Honduras."
Masters of deceit-
Convicted felons responsible for thousands
of deaths are calling the shots at the White House
Guardian, 7 August 2003
"America has started secret
negotiations with the Kosovo Liberation Army about supplying it with specialist weapons to attack Serb ground forces
in Kosovo...The strategy...has echoes of earlier
covert operations by Washington to supply arms to the Contras or the Bosnian Muslims... the State Department, which last
year was willing to accept descriptions of the KLA
as terrorist criminals but now
appears to view it as an organisation it can do business with."
US opens secret talks on arming KLA
Daily Telegraph, 12 April 1999
"Suppose a respectable opinion poll
found that most Syrians are in favour of Bashar al-Assad remaining as president, would
that not be major news? Especially as the finding would go against the dominant narrative
about the Syrian crisis, and the media considers the unexpected more newsworthy than the
obvious. Alas, not in every case. When coverage of an unfolding drama ceases to be fair
and turns into a propaganda weapon, inconvenient facts get suppressed. So it is with the
results of a recent YouGov Siraj poll on
Syria commissioned by The Doha Debates, funded by the Qatar Foundation. Qatar's royal
family has taken one of the most hawkish lines against Assad – the emir has just called for Arab
troops to intervene – so it was good that The Doha Debates published the poll on
its website. The pity is that it was ignored by almost all media outlets in every western
country whose government has called for Assad to go. The key finding was that while most
Arabs outside Syria feel the president should resign, attitudes in the country are
different. Some 55% of Syrians want Assad to stay,
motivated by fear of civil war – a spectre that is not theoretical as it is for those who live
outside Syria's borders. What is less good news for the Assad regime is that the poll also
found that half the Syrians who accept him staying in power believe he must usher in free
elections in the near future. .... As for foreign
military intervention, it has already started. It is not following the Libyan pattern
since Russia
and China are furious at the west's deception in the security council last year. They
will not accept a new United Nations resolution that allows any use of force. The model is
an older one, going back to the era of the cold war, before 'humanitarian intervention' and the 'responsibility to protect'
were developed and often misused. Remember Ronald Reagan's support for the Contras, whom he armed and trained to try to
topple Nicaragua's Sandinistas from bases in Honduras? For Honduras read Turkey, the safe
haven where the so-called Free Syrian Army has set up....Here
too western media silence is dramatic. No reporters have followed up on a significant recent article by Philip
Giraldi, a former CIA officer who now writes for the American Conservative – a
magazine that criticises the American military-industrial complex from a non-neocon
position on the lines of Ron
Paul, who came second in last week's New Hampshire Republican primary. "
Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western media
Guardian,
(Comment Is Free), 17 January 2012
An Old Model
America's Cold War Terrorism Activities |
"These Nicaraguans dying will be
added to the 800,000 I mentioned earlier, the victims - people who die - as a direct
victims of CIA covert action in the last thirty years. The minimum figure given by all
responsible parties and press and government studies..... is 800,000. The figures range
from 800,000 to a couple of million victims of CIA operations. That does not include, for
example, the people [a further two million] who died in the Vietnam war which was the
direct result of a CIA covert action.... Now that's a lot of dead people. Now the
circumstances of this killing is pure terrorism: recruiting terrorists to go across the
border and blow up, assassinate, and kill. We have to remember that the next time
President Reagan or Alexander Hague are making their pious statements about the threat of
international terrorism, and the horrors of international terrorism. The United States is, without any serious competition, leading the
world in international terrorism, today and for the past thirty years.... This gets back to the 'rogue elephant'. Is the CIA a rogue elephant?
Has it being doing all these years what the President wants. And of course the truth is
both. In some cases its done what it wanted, and in some cases it has done what it wanted
contrary to presidential orders. In other cases it's done what the President probably
wanted, but didn't say.... In this case [in Nicaragua], because of the nature of the
President and the Secretary of State, the CIA is clearly doing what the President
wanted... it has been leaked... he did order the CIA into this action."
John Stockwell, former CIA station chief in Angola
YouTube
- Alternative Views Interview. May 1982"I
find this very sad, by the way. It troubles me, obviously because I was once part of all of this, but also just as an American citizen to realise that this country is
indulging in activities that are just as cruel and just as depraved in some cases and
almost extensive as what, for example, the Gestapo indulged in in Germany. We haven't
liquidated 5 million Jews, but 800,000 minimum figure people killed in terrorist
circumstances in the third world is a lot of people dead. And the responsibility,
ultimately - yes it's done by the CIA and it's a secret organisation and therefore we have
'plausible denial' to our own consciences, because there's nothing we can do about it, we
don't know about it, they didn't consult us. But the other side of that coin is that the
CIA is the United States' police organ and what it does we the American people are
responsible for. In addition to the loss of freedom of speech and freedom of the press we
are responsible for the genocide of terrorism that is taking place against the world today
in our name and with our tax dollars.... the training for torture techniques were at St
Antonio, Texas, at one time a few years back... I don't know where it is today...."
John Stockwell, former head of CIA covert operations in Angola
Alternative
Views Interview, May 1982 |
John Stockwell Was The CIA's Station
Chief For Angola
For More Interviews With Him On CIA Covert Cction - Click Here |
The United States, The CIA And
International Terrorism - YouTube
Click
Here |
The Slaughter That Awaits Syria's
Christians
Following The Civil War Covertly Fomented By NATO
"China
today accused the West of provoking a civil war in Syria. In a front page article in the
Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, the West was attacked for supporting the
rebels intent on toppling Syria's president Bashar Assad. Party leaders in Beijing are
believed to have been heavily involved in the article which accuses the US and her allies
of purposely provoking a 'large-scale civil war'. China and Russia angered the West and
Arab states this month by blocking a draft UN Security Council resolution that backed an
Arab League plan demanding that Assad step aside. In the editorial it is claimed that if
the Security Council had passed the resolution it would only have caused more violence.
The author, named as foreign affairs expert Qu King, added: 'If
Western countries continue to fully support Syria's opposition, then in the end a
large-scale civil war will erupt and there will be no way to thus avoid the possibility of
foreign armed intervention.'...the Arab League said
some of its members were willing to arm the opposition and yesterday Foreign Secretary
William Hague appeared to echo that proposal saying: 'We cannot intervene in the way we
did in Libya ... we will do many other things.' Meanwhile
in Syria, the rebel army carried out a guerrilla-style attack in an apparent change of
tactics after weeks of heavy losses at the hands of government troops. Gunmen ambushed a
car carrying senior state prosecutor Nidal Ghazal and judge Mohammed Ziadeh yesterday
killing them both. On Saturday an unnamed politician - believed to have been close to the
president - was assassinated by rebel snipers in the regime stronghold of Aleppo. As fears
of a long civil war grow, neighbouring Jordan is racing to finish a refugee camp near the
Syrian border."
West's support for Syria rebels is stirring a civil war, says China
Evening
Standard, 20 February 2012
"The Christian
community in Syria has been hit by a series of kidnappings and brutal murders; 100
Christians have now been killed since the anti-government unrest began. A reliable source
in the country, who cannot be identified for their own safety, told Barnabas Aid that
children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the
ransom demanded, kill the victim. And the source provided detailed information, some of
which cannot be made public for security reasons, about incidents that have taken place
since Christmas. Two Christian men, one aged 28, the other a 37-year-old father with a
pregnant wife, were kidnapped by the rebels in separate incidents and later found dead;
the first was found hanged with numerous injuries, the second was cut into pieces and
thrown in a river. Four more have been abducted, and their captors are threatening to kill
them too.Two Christians were killed on January 15 as they waited for bread at a bakery.
Another Christian, aged 40 with two young children, was shot dead by three armed attackers
while he was driving a vehicle. These latest reports are reminiscent of the anti-Christian
attacks that have become commonplace in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion, and heighten
concerns about the future for Christians in Syria as the anti-government protests there
continue. Several expert commentators are calling into question the narrative being spread
by Western media about the nature of the unrest in Syria. They
argue that it is not merely an internal conflict between the government and the rebels but
has become an international battle for the balance of power in the Middle East. Aisling Byrne, writing for Asia
Times Online on January 5, argues: 'What we are seeing in Syria is a deliberate and
calculated campaign to bring down the Assad government so as to replace it with a regime
'more compatible' with US interests in the region. Not for the first time are we seeing a
close alliance between US/British neo-cons with Islamists (including, reports show, some
with links to al-Qaeda) working together to bring about regime change in an 'enemy' state.
The battle for the regional balance of power pits an alliance of the US and the Sunni
Muslim states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Gulf against the Shi'a regime in Iran and
Hizbollah, the terrorist organization that it sponsors. Syria is integral to Iran's
position, and, says Saudi King Abdullah, 'Other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic
itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria'. Much of the conflict is being
driven by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who are now repeating in Syria what they have done in
Tunisia, Egypt and Libya to establish a Sunni Wahhabi Salafist entity, thus intensifying
the pressure on Iran. A Western-backed military campaign in
alliance with the Syrian rebels against the Assad regime is looking increasingly likely,
and this could be devastating for the Church in Syria. Christians in Syria have enjoyed a
considerable measure of freedom and protection under President Assad; if he falls, there
could be a repeat of the tragic near-extermination of the Church in post-Saddam Hussein
Iraq. On January 6, 2012, the Council of Evangelical Churches
in Baghdad was dissolved, signaling another nail in the coffin for Christianity in Iraq. The once sizeable Christian minority there has been reduced to no more
than a few hundred thousand today. Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, International Director of
Barnabas Aid, said: 'The Christian community in Syria
is already suffering as a result of the unrest there and this will surely only intensify
in the event of Western-backed military intervention. Christians in the West should not
stand by and allow their governments to destroy Syria, and the Syrian Church, in
pursuit of their own political interests in the region. I urge Christians not to accept
blindly all the mainstream media reports about this conflict but to read for themselves
the carefully considered arguments of dissenting voices (links below). And we must pray
that the Lord will protect His people in Syria from a repeat of what happened to the
Church in Iraq following the illegal US-led war. When Barnabas Aid carried stories about
the horrific anti-Christian violence in Iraq post-2003, there were many sceptics who did
not believe us. Today, this is accepted reality."
Christians in Syria targeted in series of kidnappings and killings; 100 dead
Pakistan
Christian Post, 19 January 2012
"Church leaders in Iraq issued a plea
for international protection on Wednesday after the country's increasingly persecuted
Christian minority again came under deadly attack. Suspected Islamist militants detonated
11 bombs in Christian suburbs across the Iraqi capital, striking indiscriminately at shops
and homes owned by members of the increasingly vulnerable minority. At least five
Christians were killed and a further 33 wounded, among them a four-month-old baby.The attacks came less than a fortnight after extremists linked to
al-Qaeda blew themselves up during evening mass at Baghdad's main Syriac Catholic church, killing
over 50 worshippers. In the aftermath of the church massacre, The Islamic State of
Iraq, an al-Qaeda front, announced its intention to open upon the country's Christians
'the doors of destruction and rivers of blood.' With
yesterday's attacks giving extra gravity to the threat against them, Iraq's Christian
clergy warned they were in danger of becoming forgotten by the West. 'It would be criminal
on the part of the international community not to take care of the security of the
Christians,; said Athanase Matoka, the Syrian archbishop of Baghdad. ...One of the world's
oldest Christian communities, Iraq's Eastern Rite Catholics have long been in the sights
of Islamist insurgents. Since Saddam Hussein was
toppled in 2003, their numbers have halved to just 400,000. Unlike other sectarian groups in Iraq, they do not have an armed militia
to defend them, making them more vulnerable to attack. Unlike other sectarian groups in
Iraq, they do not have an armed militia to defend them, making them more vulnerable to
attack. Earlier this week, a leading Iraqi clergyman accused the Iraqi government of
abandoning Christians to a campaign of 'premeditated ethnic cleansing'. Athanasius Dawood,
archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church, said the only hope of salvation for Iraqi
Christians lay with Britain and other EU states. 'The Iraqi government is week, biased, if
not extremist,' he said. 'I ask the British
government again to help the Iraqi Christians and grant them the rights of humanitarian asylum.' Some Christians in Baghdad said the latest attacks had convinced them that
there was no point in staying in Baghdad. 'It's not worth staying in a country where the
government is not even able to protect you when you are sitting in your house,' said
Juliet Hana, who was eating breakfast with her young daughter when the bombs began to
detonate in nearby houses."
Iraq's Christian community hit by new wave of attacks
Telegraph,
10 November 2010
"Eight years
and three months after 'liberating Iraq', a time of unrelenting savage strife in which
tens of thousands died and a society was torn apart, America has formally ended its war in
Iraq. After the colours of the US forces were lowered and the 'Last Post' was played,
Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told troops: 'You will leave with great pride, lasting
pride, secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people to cast tyranny
aside and to offer hope for prosperity and peace to this country's future generations.'
The ceremony, just 48 minutes long to limit the scope of any possible attack, was held
behind high, fortified walls in a concrete courtyard at the airport in Baghdad. 'We
spilled a lot of blood here,' Mr Panetta acknowledged. But, he insisted: 'It has been to
achieve a mission making the country sovereign and independent and able to govern and
secure itself.' Not far from where the speeches were taking place lay grim evidence which
refuted the claims that the Americans were leaving behind a land of stability and
prosperity. More than 8,000 people are living in squalor in a field of mud and foetid
water, with huts made of rags and salvaged pieces of wood. The residents of Al-Rahlat camp
are among 1.3 million refugees
in their own country; families driven out of their
homes by the sectarian violence spawned by the war. Another
1.6 million fled Iraq for neighbouring states, mainly Jordan
and Syria. Those in Syria, with its escalating violence, are now
having to seek another place of safety."
Will Iraq's 1.3 million refugees ever be able to go home?
Independent,
16 December 2011
| 'Those Who Assist Are Culpable' |
"In Syria,
little unites those opposed to Bashar Assad other than their enmity. ...... Should the
Assad regime fall.... sectarianism may well engulf Syria. ....Those
who assist in the downfall of even the most horrific regime share in culpability for what
follows it, and in Syria that may be
something ugly indeed."
Syria’s Assault
London Times, 9 February 2012, Print Edition, P2 |
How NATO Destroyed World Peace
Gorbachev Says 'Military Industrial Complex' Is 'Real Government' Of United States
"Almost
before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney called together a group of
players to chart out a strategy for the post-Cold War world. The names should be familiar, because they run the present
administration: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. The
goal was to 'shape' the world in order to, in the words of another team member, Zalmay Khalizad (now special
envoy to Afghanistan), 'preclude the rise of another
global rival for the indefinite future.' In his book
'From Containment to Global Leadership?' Khalizad argues that it is 'vital' to prevent
such a rival from developing and 'to be willing to
use force if necessary.'.."
Are we on the road to war?
San Francisco Examiner, 19 April
2002
"Mikhail Gorbachev has accused the United States of mounting
an imperialist conspiracy against Russia that could push the world into a new Cold War. Delivering one of
his most scathing attacks on the US, Mr Gorbachev told The Daily Telegraph that a US
military build-up was under way to contain a resurgent Russia. From Nato's expansion plans in the former
Soviet Union to Washington's proposals for a bigger defence budget and a missile shield in
central Europe, the US was deliberately quashing hopes for permanent peace with Russia, Mr
Gorbachev said. 'We had 10 years after the Cold War
to build a new world order and yet we squandered them,' he said. 'The problem is not with Russia,' he said, speaking at a
friend's château outside Paris. 'Russia does not have enemies and Putin is not going to
start a war against the United States or any other country for that matter. Yet we see the
United States approving a military budget and the defence secretary pledging to strengthen
conventional forces because of the possibility of a war with China or Russia. I sometimes have a feeling that the United States is going to wage
war against the entire world.' Relations have
further deteriorated after Nato promised eventual
membership to Georgia and Ukraine, a move
interpreted by Mr Gorbachev as an attempt to extend America's sphere of influence into
Russia's backyard. 'The Americans promised that Nato
wouldn't move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central
and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot
be trusted.'.... He railed against a 'military-industrial
complex' that he insisted was the 'real government' of the US and, quoting a Russian documentary on state television, suggested that Margaret Thatcher had supplied weapons to Chechen terrorists."
Gorbachev: US could start new Cold War
Daily
Telegraph, 7 May 2008 |
Chechen Terrorists? What On Earth
Is Mikhail Gorbachev Taking About?
Militant Islam And NATO's Covert Operations
In Chechnya's 'Pipeline-istan'
Click Here |
A New Confrontation With Russia
NATO Aggression Forces Moscow To Re-arm In A New Arms Race At The Very Moment The
West Is Running Out Of Money
And Russia's Oil Revenues Are Increasing
"Confirmation that the U.S. and its
allies are studying their military
options for helping the anti-Assad rebels in Syria is a worrying development on a
number of levels, not least of which is the prospect
of the West becoming embroiled in a direct confrontation with the Russians...... the West – and
that includes Britain – needs to proceed with great caution before it gets too
closely involved in the Syrian crisis. As with the
Libya situation last year, we still have no clear idea who the rebels are in Syria, or
what their ultimate objective might be. Homs, the centre of the anti-Assad rebellion, is a
known centre for Islamist extremists, and if all Western intervention achieves is the replacement of the Assad
regime with an Iranian-style Islamist dictatorship, then we will have scored a monumental
own goal. Of deeper concern, though, is the possibility that the U.S. could find itself
involved in a direct military confrontation with Russia over the future of Syria's destiny.
We have been here before, of course, during the 1980s when, at the height of the Cold War, Moscow and
Washington fought a proxy war over the fate of neighbouring Lebanon..... a similar
confrontation could easily arise if Washington decides to become engaged militarily in
Syria to protect anti-government rebels..... This week's visit by Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov to Damascus has highlighted Syria's importance to Moscow. The Syrian port of
Tartus is Russia's only military base outside the old Soviet Union and, at a time when the
West is strengthening its ties throughout the Arab world, the Russians regard Syria as a
vital strategic asset. Consequently any attempt by
the Western powers to meddle in Syria's internal affairs is likely to prompt a robust
response from Moscow. One of the
reasons the Lebanese civil war dragged on for fifteen years was that the conflict ended up
being caught in a turf war between Washington and Moscow."
Russia is squaring up for a fight with America over Syria
Telegraph,
9 February 2012
"The
United States is flying unmanned reconnaissance planes over Syria to monitor the regime's escalating crackdown on dissent, U.S. defense
officials told NBC television on Saturday.... Russia continues to come to aid of the Assad regime with weapon shipments, and
on Friday two Iranian warships passed through the Suez Canal on the way to Tartus port in
Syria. Western officials fear that Iranian military presence along with Russian aid could turn Syria into a center of
international friction much worse than the struggle inside Syria. They fear that the control over actions in Syria will be taken over by a
Russian-Iranian 'partnership' which would exclude the European Union and Turkey and that
U.S. involvement could be too late and inefficient. Turkey fears this development
after a diplomatic crisis erupted with Syria when more
than 40 Turkish intelligence officers were captured by the Syrian army. Over the past week, Turkey has been conducting intensive negotiations
with Syria in order to secure their freedom, and Syria insists that their release will be
conditioned on the extradition of Syrian officers and soldiers that defected and are
currently in Turkey. .... Turkey, who mediated several weeks ago between the Free Syria
Army and Iran to secure the release of several Iranian citizens who were captured by the
rebels, rejects Syria's demands, and for this reason Turkish sources believe that Turkey
will soon decide on hardening its stance on Syria. Syria, on the other hand, has recently
published 'confessions' that it allegedly gathered from the Turkish officers that they
were trained by Israel's Mossad, and were given instructions to carry out bombings to
undermine the country's security. According to the Syrians, one of the Turkish officers
said that the Mossad also trains soldiers from the Free Syria Army, and that Mossad agents
came to Jordan in order to train al-Qaida officials to send to Syria to carry out
attacks."
Report: U.S. drones flying over Syria to monitor crackdown
Haaretz,
19 February 2012
"Prime Minister Vladimir Putin
inspected one of Russia’s new stealth fighter jets on Monday and said Russia needs a
stronger military to protect it against foreign attempts to stoke conflict around its
borders. Less than two weeks before a March 4 presidential election in which he hopes for
a resounding win, Mr. Putin visited Komsomolsk-on-Amur, a snow-swept city in Russia’s
Far East where military and civilian plane maker Sukhoi is a big employer.... 'New regional and local wars are being sparked before our very eyes,' Mr.
Putin wrote in the article published on the front page of Russia’s official gazette,
Rossiiskaya Gazeta. 'There are attempts to provoke such conflicts in the immediate
vicinity of the borders of Russia and our allies,' he added in the article.... Russia has
criticized the NATO mission in
Libya, saying it overstepped the mandate it was given by the United Nations Security
Council and helped rebels oust Colonel Moammar Gadhafi last year, and it has stood behind
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, one of Moscow’s few allies in the Middle East. In
the latest of his articles published on the key policies of his presidential campaign, Mr.
Putin made no specific mention of Libya or Syria. But he wrote that recent events showed the diminished stature of international law. Russia, he said, must rely on a powerful military to make sure its
position is understood. 'Under these conditions Russia cannot depend solely on diplomatic
or economic methods of resolving conflict,' he wrote. 'Before us stands the mission of
developing our military potential in the framework of a strategy of containment and
remaining sufficiently armed.”
Putin campaigns on Russian military buildup
Globe
And Mail (Canada), 21 February 2012
Working Through The Pentagon's Pre-Meditated Hit
List
General
Wesley Clark |
"As I went back through the
Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat.
Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was
being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries,
beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya,
Iran, Somalia and Sudan....He said it with
reproach--with disbelief, almost--at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation
away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to
see moving forward, either. ... I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned."
General Wesley Clark, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe 1997 - 2000
'Winning
Modern' Wars, PublicAffairs, October 2003
Planning For Post-Cold War Blood Bath Began In 1991
How Paul Wolfowitz Destroyed The Opportunity For Peace After The End Of The Soviet
Union
"In October, 2007, Gen. Wesley Clark gave a
speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco (seven-minute
excerpt in the video below) in which he denounced what he called 'a policy coup'
engineered by neocons in the wake of 9/11. After recounting how a Pentagon source had told
him weeks after 9/11 of the Pentagon’s plan to attack Iraq notwithstanding its
non-involvement in 9/11, this is how Clark described the aspirations of the 'coup' being
plotted by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and what he called 'a half dozen other collaborators from the Project for
the New American Century':
Six weeks later, I saw the same officer, and asked: 'Why
haven’t we attacked Iraq? Are we still going to attack Iraq?'
He said: 'Sir, it’s worse than that.' He said –
he pulled up a piece of paper off his desk – he said: 'I just got this memo from the
Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re
going to attack and destroy the
governments in 7 countries in five years –
we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria,
Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
Clark said the aim of this plot was this:
'They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our
control.' He then recounted a conversation he had had
ten years earlier with Paul Wolfowitz — back in 1991 — in which the then-number-3-Pentagon-official, after criticizing
Bush 41 for not toppling Saddam, told Clark: 'But one thing we did learn [from the Persian
Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the region – in the Middle East –
and the Soviets
won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria,
Iran [sic], Iraq – before the next great
superpower comes on to challenge us.' Clark said he
was shocked by Wolfowitz’s desires because, as Clark put it: 'the
purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments? It’s not to deter
conflicts?'”
Wes Clark and the neocon dream
Salon.com,
26 November 2011
"Since the breakup of the Soviet Union
twenty years ago, Western commentators have often celebrated it as though what disappeared
from the world arena in December 1991 was the old Soviet Union, the USSR of Stalin and Brezhnev, rather than
the reforming Soviet Union of perestroika. Moreover, discussion of its consequences has
focused mostly on developments inside Russia. Equally
important, however, have been the consequences for international relations, in particular
lost alternatives for a truly new world order opened up by the end of the cold war...... But as long as the West insisted on its purported victory in the
cold war, it meant that no change was needed in the old cold war thinking and that the old
methods, such as using military force and political and economic pressure to impose one
model on everyone, would still be used."
Mikhail Gorbachev
Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union?
The
Nation, 21 December 2011 |
Now Even The Telegraph Suspects The British Public Have
Become Victims Of A Calculated Deception
"David Cameron and William Hague are
at risk of over-simplifying a dangerous and complex situation. When two car bombings
killed nearly 50 people in the heart of the Syrian capital of Damascus just before
Christmas, we in the West were quick to challenge claims made on state TV that the
atrocities had been carried out by al-Qaeda. We were inclined to award more credibility to
the Syrian rebels, who denied that the terror group was involved at all, and insisted that
the attacks had been cynically staged by the government, perhaps as a bid for
international sympathy. However, all doubt ended last week when James Clapper, director of
US national intelligence, informed the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Damascus
bombings 'had all the earmarks of an al-Qaeda attack'. Mr Clapper added that 'we believe
al-Qaeda in Iraq is extending its reach into Syria'. So,
it’s official. Al-Qaeda is acknowledged as an ally of Britain and America in our
desire to overturn the Syrian government. Think about it. Ten years ago, in the wake of
the destruction of the Twin Towers, we invaded Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaeda. Now the
world’s most notorious terror organisation wants to join a new 'coalition of the
willing' in Syria (not just al-Qaeda: yesterday the Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir staged a
march through west London in support of their Syrian brothers and the establishment of the
Khilafah state). This may be the most profound turnaround in global
politics since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 converted Soviet Russia and Nazi
Germany from bitter enemies into allies – and it is important to understand that the
affinity of interests between al-Qaeda and the West extends far beyond Syria. Britain, the
United States and al-Qaeda also have a deep, structural hostility to President
Assad’s biggest sponsor, Iran. Like al-Qaeda, we are interested in undermining Hamas
in Gaza and Hezbollah in the Lebanon. In Libya, David
Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy threw their weight behind the destruction of Gaddafi’s
government and its replacement by a new regime which reportedly embraces
al-Qaeda-connected figures....Washington never
ceases to complain about the connection between the Pakistani intelligence services and
the Taliban. But we never hear a whisper of concerns about the connection between Saudi
intelligence and Salafi movements across the Middle East, of which al-Qaeda is the best
known offshoot...... The situation could hardly be more dangerous or more complex. Yet, in recent public pronouncements David Cameron has repeatedly
spoken of the conflict in Syria as a struggle between an illegal and autocratic regime at
war with what he likes to call 'the people'. Either he is poorly briefed, or he is coming dangerously close to a calculated deception of the British public.....Meanwhile, in Libya there are
menacing signs that last year’s Anglo-French intervention is starting to go wrong.
The toppling of the Gaddafi regime has not brought an end to
the killing. If anything, the
fighting appears to be getting worse, as the country breaks
into hostile armed fractions – a fertile hunting ground for al-Qaeda, our latest collaborator in the war
on terror."
Syria's crisis is leading us to unlikely bedfellows
Telegraph,
18 February 2012
'My Enemy's Enemy Is My Friend'
NATO's Secret 30 Year Alliance Of Convenience With 'Al Qaeda'
What's Really
Been Going On Since The Fall Of The Berlin Wall |
| The Telegraph, above, is right to be alarmed at the involvement of 'Al Qaeda'
(an elastic term used when needed to present militant Islam in a most fearsome light) in
efforts to topple the Assad regime in Syria. However, it overlooks one basic dimension.
This is not the 'turnaround' it claims. NATO has been in secret alliance with Islamic
terrorist groups for more than 30 years in order to destabise target countries around the
world. There was seemingly a brief pause in this approach after 9/11, but
by no later than 2003 the Pentagon was once again looking to
co-opt militant Islamists, in this case the People's Mujahadeen of Iran (aka the 'MEK')
based in Iraq, a State Department listed terrorist organisation, to destablise Iran. It is
the MEK who are understood, with
covert backing from the United States and Israel, to have carried out recent assassination
bombings (i.e. terrorist attacks) on nuclear scientists in Iran.
This use of militant Islam to detablise foreign countries
was used most notably in the covert war in Afghanistan against the Soviets during the
1980s, when NATO countries secretly fought alongside Osama Bin Laden. Most moderately well
read people know that by now, and at least some of the route to 9/11 thereafter.
However, what is less well known is that this kind of
deadly covert NATO alliance with Islamic terrorists also continued during the supposed
post 'cold war' period, in the case of the Balkans,
the Caucasus, North Africa,
and now Syria and Iran (how such 'deniable' destabilisation methods are conducted were recently set out by the intelligence consultancy STRATFOR in the context of the developing
crisis in Syria).
In simple terms, whilst militant Islam can be a tactical threat to the United
States and its allies (by conducting terrorist attacks on American targets when the
interests of the two parties collide), it has never been a strategic threat to the
ambitions of neoconservative planners. Their overarching aims are regime change in target
nation states and the prevention of the rise of a rival superpower.
The two main targets in the latter respect are China (the world's largest
consumer of energy) and, to a lesser revivalist degree, Russia (the world's largest
producer of oil and gas). Militant Islam is a tool which can be used to weaken their
geostrategic position at different points on the globe, as has just happened in Libya, and
is now taking place in Syria. Indeed, even Mikhail Gorbachev himself has openly accused the British government of backing terrorists in Chechnya, situated in one of the
world's most strategic pipeline corridors.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that it was China and Russia who took exception
to the convertion of the alleged humanitarian mission in Libya into one of regime change.
In that exercise NATO allied with the militant Islamists whom Gaddafi had spent decades
trying to bring under control, with Gaddafi in fact being the first leader in the world to
seek an Interpol arrest warrant
against Osama Bin Laden.
Once bitten, twice shy. China and Russia have subsequently vetoed proposals
against Syria brought forward at the UN.
As Gorbachev himself essentially points out, the cold war never really ended,
and the biggest single opportunity for the creation of world peace since the end of World
War II, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union, has been
destroyed by zenophobic and avaricious extremists in Washington in the process.
Now humanity faces the threat of a third world war as the post 9/11
confrontation with Iran reaches its climax.
nlpwessex.org |
Hypocrisy Wars - 'Our Terrorists'
"The Pentagon
is considering a
massive covert action program to overthrow Iran's ruling ayatollahs... The proposal, sources
say, includes using all available points of pressure on the Iranian regime, including backing armed Iranian dissidents and employing the services of the Mujahedeen e Khalq, a group currently branded as terrorist by the United States.... The State
Department argument was that MEK is on the terrorist list and any failure to disarm it would be an act of hypocrisy..."
Pentagon Eyes Massive Covert
Attack On Iran
ABC News, 29 May 2003
"The corrosive mistrust that festers
between Iran and the West stretches from the British and US-backed coup of 1953 to the
present day, with continuing covert foreign programmes aimed at regime change. British
intelligence sources strongly deny Iranian assertions that Britain is backing the Sunni
rebel group behind the weekend’s suicide attack on the Revolutionary Guards in
Sistan-Baluchistan. Washington also denies involvement. In 2005, the year that the opposition Jundallah turned to violence,
Washington began the latest covert programme of lending assistance to Iranian militant
opposition groups, hoping to effect regime change from within. In 2007 President Bush
requested, and received, a budget of $400 million from Congress to back such groups
violently opposing the Islamic regime — among them
Jundallah and the Mujahidin e-Khalq. The latter, although proscribed by the State
Department as a terror organisation, has proved valuable in
passing intelligence on Iran’s nuclear programme, including the 2002 reports of a
secret nuclear plant at Natanz that blew the lid on Iran’s current nuclear programme.
The group, also known as the National Council of Resistance of Iran, has an office in
London. The Bush Administration’s backing for
internal regime change sprang from a realisation of the risks of military action against
Iran to halt its nuclear programme. The question is
whether such programmes have continued under President Obama and whether they may now
threaten to derail the diplomatic track that he espouses. Colonel Sam Gardner, a retired US Air Force commander, argued in a study
last year that such clandestine activities only made the regime more paranoid and
distrustful of the veracity of a diplomatic approach. 'It is bad policy and it is
dangerous,' he wrote in October 2008. Comments out of Tehran on Sunday suggest that the
regime does not believe that anything has changed....Pakistani military officials have
themselves complained about the US backing Jundallah on its soil. Yet Pakistan itself is
believed to train and assist Jundallah as a tool of influence in Iran, just as it created
the Taleban to give it leverage in Afghanistan. Operation
Ajax, the CIA/MI6-backed coup which overthrew the
democratically elected Iranian Government in 1953, serves as a reminder that Western
intelligence services historically have been prepared to intervene in Iran."
Britain and US reject Iranian accusations over terror attacks
London
Times, 20 October 2009
Eisenhower Saw How Militarism Would
Come To Dominate America And Ultimately Destroy What It Is Supposed To Be
"My fellow Americans.... America's leadership and prestige depend, not
merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the
interests of world peace and human betterment... This conjunction of an immense military establishment
and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.... we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous
rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our
liberties or democratic processes.... America knows that this world of ours, ever growing
smaller, must avoid becoming a
community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust
and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals."
President Dwight Eisenhower
Television
Farewell Presidential Address, 17 January 1961 (Click Here To Watch Recording Of Speech)
".....'According to some estimates we
cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,' [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld admitted [on 10
September 2001]. $2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To
understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what
happened to a mere $300 million. 'We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it
on,' said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service."
The War On Waste
CBS News, 29
January 2002
Bringing Islamic Jihad To Syria
The Secret Role Of NATO
"NATO
is already clandestinely engaged in the Syrian conflict, with Turkey taking the lead
as U.S. proxy. ...... Unmarked NATO
warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to
Iskenderum on the Syrian border, delivering weapons from the
late Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals as well as volunteers from the Libyan Transitional
National Council who are experienced in pitting local volunteers against trained soldiers,
a skill they acquired confronting Gaddafi’s army. Iskenderum is also the seat of the Free
Syrian Army, the armed wing of the Syrian National
Council. French and British special forces trainers are on the ground, assisting the
Syrian rebels while the CIA and U.S. Spec Ops are providing communications equipment and
intelligence to assist the rebel cause, enabling the fighters to avoid concentrations of
Syrian soldiers. ...... Syrian government claims that it is being assaulted by rebels who
are armed, trained, and financed by foreign governments are more true than false."
Philip
Giraldi, former senior CIA officer, whose career postings included Turkey
NATO vs. Syria
The American
Conservative, 19 December 2011
NATO's New Jihadi Ally In Libya
Supplies Islamists To Fight With Syrian Rebels
"Abdel
Hakim Belhadj ..... helped Nato oust the tyrant
[Gadaffi] by leading the military assault on Tripoli."
Libyan revolutionary Britain 'handed over to Gaddafi's henchmen' sues and could be in line
for £1m payout at taxpayers' expense
Mail,
20 December 2011
"Libyan
authorities this week dispatched the country's most renowned Islamist militia leader to
meet senior figures of the Free Syrian Army, The Daily Telegraph has learned. Abdulhakim
Belhadj, head of the Tripoli Military Council and the former
leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, 'met with Free Syrian Army leaders in Istanbul and on the border with
Turkey,' said a military official working with Mr Belhadj. 'Mustafa Abdul Jalil (the interim
Libyan president) sent him there.' The 'covert
operation' was immediately laid bare when a rival
Libyan rebel brigade detained Belhaj at Tripoli airport, accused him of travelling on a
fake passport, and declared they would jail the senior military leader. Only a
letter from the country's interim president was enough to persuade them to let him leave
the country. The meetings came as a sign of a
growing ties between Libya's fledgling government and the Syrian opposition. The Daily
Telegraph on Saturday revealed that the new Libyan authorities had offered money and
weapons to the growing insurgency against Bashar al-Assad. Mr Belhaj also discussed
sending Libyan fighters to train troops, the source said. Having ousted one dictator, triumphant young men, still filled with
revolutionary fervour, are keen to topple the next. The commanders of armed gangs still
roaming Tripoli's streets said yesterday that 'hundreds' of fighters wanted to wage war
against the Assad regime."
Leading Libyan Islamist met Free Syrian Army opposition group
Telegraph,
27 November 2011
"Omar
Bakri Mohammed, the radical cleric banned from the United Kingdom for 'glorifying
terrorism', has told the Daily Telegraph from his base in the Middle East that al Qaeda is poised to wage war against the Syrian regime. Bakri, once nicknamed the
'Tottenham Ayatollah', said hard line Salafi Muslim groups, including al Qaeda, and his
own Al-Ghuraba group, also proscribed in the UK, are ready to help their 'Muslim brothers'
with a campaign of suicide attacks against President Bashar al Assad.... The volatility in
the Arab world, and the dismantling of authoritarian regimes and ruthless intelligence
services have given Salafist groups room to breathe and the thousands of jailed Islamists
in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, released as the dictatorships crumbled, have been perfect for
recruiting he added.... Al-Qaeda's backing of the
Arab Spring, brings it into an unlikely alignment with
western powers seeking to oust beleaguered President Assad."
Muslim cleric banned from Britain claims Al Qaeda poised to launch sucide attacks in Syria
Telegraph,
25 January 2012
The Greater Humanitarian Crisis That Is Expected To
Follow Forcible Removal Of Assad
"Barnabas
Fund said that more than 200 Christians had been killed in the conflict so far and that
the Christian community had been beset by a series of kidnappings. 'The rebels make high ransom demands for the return of the captives, but
in two known cases the victims’ bodies were found after the money had been paid,' the
charity said. 'Some families are now becoming so desperate that they tell the kidnappers
to kill their loved one immediately rather than subjecting them to torture.' Barnabas Fund
is working with Christian partners in Syria to deliver urgent supplies to families in
need."
Barnabas Fund launches crisis appeal for Christians in Syria
Christian
Today, 17 February 2012
"The
departure of al Qaida-affiliated fighters from Iraq to join the rebellion against Syrian
President Bashar Assad in Syria has had one benefit, Iraqi officials say: Violence has dropped in this country, in some areas by as much as 50
percent in just a few months. Iraqi officials declined to provide precise figures for the
drop-off or to estimate how many al Qaida-affiliated fighters have left the country for
Syria. But the impact of the departure, they said, has been especially apparent in Ninewah
province, which borders Syria and has long been the scene of some of al Qaida in Iraq's
most violent bombings and assassinations....Last Thursday, James R. Clapper, the Obama
administration's director of national intelligence, told Congress that the United States
thought al Qaida-affiliated fighters were responsible for the most spectacular rebel
attacks on Syrian military forces in recent months, including suicide bombings in Damascus
in December and January and two attacks earlier this month in Aleppo. The four attacks,
which targeted Syrian military or intelligence facilities, killed at least 70 people....
The anti-Assad movement has become increasingly violent in recent months, however, as
frustrated opposition forces, bolstered by defections from Assad's military, have taken up
arms, fighting pitched battles with security troops in Homs and other cities. On Feb. 11, gunmen assassinated the head of the military hospital
in Damascus, the first killing of a military officer in the capital. The Syrian government
claims that 2,000 security officers and soldiers have been killed since the uprising began
last March. Iraqi officials said they thought that many of the al Qaida-affiliated
fighters who'd left Iraq were foreigners."
Iraq officials: Violence drops as al Qaida group moves to Syria
McClatchy
Newspapers, 20 February 2012
"Hundreds of Syrian Christians have
been killed and several Christians kidnapped as fighting rages between government forces
and rebels, an aid group working [Barnabas Fund] in the region told BosNewsLife Thursday,
February 16....The Britain-based group said at least over 200 Syrian Christians died in
recent clashes and added that the community 'has been beset by a series' of kidnappings
blamed mainly on rebels calling themselves the Free Syrian Army. 'The rebels make high
ransom demands for the return of the captives, but in two known cases the victims’
bodies were found after the money had been paid,' Barnabas Fund claimed, without providing
more details. 'Some families are now becoming so desperate that they tell the kidnappers
to kill their loved one immediately rather than subjecting them to torture.'...the reported incidents came after church leaders said they fear 'a mass genocide of Christians' if Islamists
takeover in Syria, where Sunnis Muslims make up 74 percent of the country's 2.2 million
population....Among them are thousands of Iraqi
Christian refugees who have been forced from their homeland by anti-Christian violence and
persecution, and are already in desperate need, Barnabas Fund said. While Christians have
expressed concerns over reported brutality under the the current president, they are even
more worried about their future, according to Christian rights activists."
Syria Christians In Firing Line; Hundreds Killed
BosNewsLife,
17 February 2012
| 'Those Who Assist Are Culpable' |
"In Syria,
little unites those opposed to Bashar Assad other than their enmity. ...... Should the
Assad regime fall.... sectarianism may well engulf Syria. ....Those who assist in the downfall of even the most horrific regime
share in culpability for what follows it,
and in Syria that may be something ugly indeed."
Syria’s Assault
London Times, 9 February 2012, Print Edition, P2 |
'Responsibility To Protect' =
'Opportunity To Destroy And Ignore'
The Libyan Fate Awaits Syria As Most Of Media Looks The Other Way Whilst NATO
Bombing Legacy Takes Shape
"Libya's interim rulers declared the
country liberated on Sunday after an eight-month civil war, launching the oil-rich nation
on what is meant to be a two-year transition to democracy. But they laid out plans with an
Islamist tone that could rattle their Western backers.... Abdul-Jalil
laid out a vision for a new Libya with an Islamist tint, saying Islamic Sharia law would
be the 'basic source' of legislation, and that existing laws that contradict the teachings
of Islam would be nullified... In Brussels, neither
the EU nor NATO wanted to address the issue of Sharia
law. A NATO official said it was for the Libyans to
decide on the system in their own country."
Libya's transitional leader declares liberation
Associated
Press, 23 October 2011
"Days
after Gaddafi was buried, the flag of Al Qaeda is flying in Libya and sharia law has been
imposed. Now, many rebel fighters fear the rise of a hardline Islamist state - and will
fight to the death to stop it.... Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the most powerful military figure in the new
Libya, is regarded by many here — including civilians who risked everything to rise
up against Gaddafi — as a dangerous radical who threatens to ignite a whole new
conflict over his Islamic extremism. Indeed, many
former rebel fighters talk openly about launching a new revolution if the country’s
political leaders on the National Transitional Council give in to pressure from Belhaj,
head of the Military Council, to turn Libya into a fundamentalist Islamic state, modelled
along the lines of the old Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Publicly, this bearded
45-year-old — who fought alongside extremists in Afghanistan, including Osama Bin
Laden, in the Eighties, and was trained by military chiefs in Iran — has sought to
quell Western fears that his ultimate aim is a hardline Islamic state. ‘I didn’t
go to Afghanistan to fight with Bin Laden,’ Belhaj told an Arab newspaper last week.
‘Meeting a person with a specific ideology doesn’t mean I agree with that
ideology. I went to Afghanistan to support the Afghans and fight with them, that’s
all.’ But this is far from the truth. Throughout his life, until his supposed
dramatic conversion in one of Gaddafi’s torture cells, he has been committed to jihad
— the overthrow by Holy War of Christian states and the creation of an Islamic world.
His past proclamations, dispensed in classical Arabic script, reveal a man who regards all
Christians as infidels and that even speaking to a non-Muslim is a crime, while believing
jihad is the duty of all Libyans. Even worse, he’s received messages of support from
Ayman al-Zawahri, who became Al Qaeda’s leader after Bin Laden’s death. The
terror leader has warned Belhaj to protect the gains he and his supporters have made:
‘Be careful of plots of the West and its henchmen. Don’t allow them to steal
your sacrifices.’ Burgeoning links between Libya and Al Qaeda were highlighted this
week with the chilling sight of the terror network’s flag being flown from the
courthouse in Benghazi, the spiritual home of the revolution in the east of Libya. It
bears Arabic script which declares ‘there is no God but Allah’, with a full moon
underneath. There are also reports of extremists on the city’s streets at night,
waving the Al Qaeda flag and chanting Islamic slogans. On past form, Abdel Hakim Belhaj
will not be discomfited by these developments: he was the driving force behind the recent
announcement that the country will introduce Sharia law, a brutal form of justice that
includes floggings and executions for those accused of ‘crimes’ such as
adultery, homosexuality and theft. As well as allowing Libyan men to take multiple wives
— and giving males custody of children, while women have no right to divorce —
he wants brutal punishments for anyone who criticises Islam or refuses to pray. His
background gives little cause for celebration in Britain. Indeed, Belhaj — who used
the Islamic nom de guerre Abu Abdullah Sadeq when he was in Afghanistan — has good
reason to hate the West, a fact that should give pause to businessmen hoping for access to
the country’s bountiful oil reserves. Born in the capital Tripoli, Belhaj studied
civil engineering before joining other Islamic extremists in the Eighties and attempting
to launch an uprising against Gaddafi’s rule. It failed. Belhaj fled to Afghanistan
and fought in the Soviet-Afghan war. He returned to Libya and formed the Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group, a collection of jihadists committed to introducing fundamentalism. After
the movement was crushed by Gaddafi’s brutal security apparatus, Belhaj returned to
Afghanistan and fought with the Taliban until 2002, when he went on the run again. He was
picked up by British and U.S. intelligence in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2004 and handed
over to Gaddafi, with whom the West was anxious to curry favour over oil deals. Manacled
to a wall in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison, the Islamic terrorist was not
allowed to wash for three years and was finally released last year on condition he
renounced violence. He has since said he supports a free, democratic Libya and is opposed
to Al Qaeda — a claim that prompts cynical laughter from those who know him. The
blood-soaked circumstances of Belhaj’s sudden rise to power, underlined when he
appeared on state television to announce Gaddafi’s death, suggest that renunciation
was entirely hollow. For many believe the real transfer of power in Libya came not with
the capture and killing of Gaddafi last month, but with a murky assassination carried out
near the rebel frontline three months ago. It was then that Abdel Fattah Younis, a
moderate who was head of the rebel army, received a message that he was to come to
Benghazi in the east of Libya to meet the country’s political leadership. He never
made it. Driving through the night with two bodyguards, he was ambushed by a hardline
Islamic rebel unit. All three were shot dead and their bodies burned and left in a ditch
by the road. While Belhaj denied responsibility, he was the prime beneficiary, taking over
as military chief and moving a step closer to total power. He was hailed a few weeks ago
by his Islamic supporters as the man who led the attack on Gaddafi’s Tripoli
compound."
Peace? You're joking. Much blood will yet be shed in Libya
Mail,
2 November 2011
"A
terrified Libyan man is beaten and tortured with electric shocks by youths who appear to
be former revolutionary fighters. The images, taken from a video handed to The Mail on
Sunday in a Tripoli refugee camp, will be seen as fresh evidence that those who deposed
Colonel Gaddafi with the help of the West are adopting methods as brutal as the dead
tyrant’s. The film shows three men tying up the
blood-spattered man before whipping him repeatedly with cables, touching him on his skin
with electric wires and taunting him as he pleads for mercy. The men, one of whom is
wearing combat trousers and is armed with a knife, tell the man that ‘blood will come
from your eyes and nose until you admit what you have done’. The new video images
follow growing protests about abuse and torture in parts of the country. Doctors from the
aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) have pulled out after refusing to deal with the
results of such brutality in their clinics. According to sources, the youths in the video
were former rebels who refused to surrender their weapons at the end of the civil war in
October – and are intent on revenge on those they suspect of having supported
Gaddafi. They are said to have driven in armed trucks into the al-Fellah ‘internally
displaced persons’ (IDP) camp in a suburb of Tripoli, firing at crowds and searching
homes until they found men on their list of ‘suspects’. Their victim, seen on
the video, was Saleh Barhoun Gersh, who had run a general store in Towerga – which
was loyal to Gaddafi during the conflict until the town was ransacked by fighters from
nearby Misrata city.... The abuse of Mr Gersh was captured on a mobile phone left behind
in the chaos of a raid. Libya’s interim government has admitted it is largely
powerless to prevent this collapse of law and order. It comes at a time when doubts are
being raised about Nato’s support for the uprising. Britain spent about £300million
on bombing raids to help secure the victory that ousted the Gaddafi regime four months
ago. But local militias are hell-bent on
revenge against their former enemies. They also frequently clash with rival militias.
Thousands of fighters have commandeered schools, halls and sports centres as detention
facilities for ‘suspects’ they capture from their homes or the street. The
Misrata brigades are considered the most hostile, with thousands of untrained youths
carrying out the aggressive interrogation. In other footage collected by the camp manager,
more than 30 armed trucks are shown on an early morning raid into the camp. Women scream
that they are being attacked in their beds and that some family members are sick. ‘Is
this the new revolution. Is this the justice we all fought for?’ they shout.... Amnesty International has
documented thousands of cases of abuse and torture, and handed photographs to The Mail on
Sunday. Senior crisis response adviser Donatella
Rovera has protested to the National Transitional Council (NTC) without success....Khaled
Ben Ali, head of LibAid, an umbrella organisation for humanitarian agencies, said that NTC
ministers told him they were powerless: ‘The Prime Minister told me he had issued
written orders for the surrender of weapons and the militias tore them up. 'They fought
for freedom and now they think they are free to do what they like. What they like is
revenge. There is no effective judicial system. Maybe we need the UN Security Council to
find new ways of protecting our civilians.’"
Caught on video: The horrifying proof that Libya's freedom fighters have turned into
brutal torturers
Mail,
12 February 2012
"As the militiamen saw it, they had
the best of intentions. They assaulted another militia at a seaside base here this week to
rescue a woman who had been abducted. When the guns
fell silent, briefly, the scene that unfolded felt as chaotic as Libya’s revolution
these days — a government whose authority extends no further than its offices,
militias whose swagger comes from guns far too plentiful and residents whose patience
fades with every volley of gunfire that cracks at night....'This is destruction!' complained Nouri Ftais, a 51-year-old commander,
who offered a rare, unheeded voice of reason. 'We’re
destroying Libya with our bare hands.'. The country that witnessed the Arab world’s most sweeping
revolution is foundering. So is its capital, where a
semblance of normality has returned after the chaotic days of the fall of Tripoli last
August. But no one would consider a city ordinary where militiamen tortured to death an
urbane former diplomat two weeks ago, where hundreds of refugees deemed loyal to Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi waited hopelessly in a camp and where a government official acknowledged
that 'freedom is a problem.' Much about the scene on Wednesday was lamentable, perhaps
because the discord was so commonplace. 'Some of it is really overwhelming,' said Ashur
Shamis, an adviser to Libya’s interim prime minister, Abdel-Rahim el-Keeb. 'But
somehow we have this crazy notion that we can defeat it.' There remains optimism in
Tripoli, not least because the country sits atop so much oil. But Mr. Keeb’s
government, formed Nov. 28, has found itself virtually paralyzed by rivalries that have
forced it to divvy up power along lines of regions and personalities, by unfulfillable
expectations that Colonel Qaddafi’s fall would bring prosperity, and by a
powerlessness so marked that the national army is treated as if it were another militia.
....The question underlines the issue of legitimacy, which remains the most pressing
matter in revolutionary Libya. Officials hope that elections in May or June can do what
they did in Egypt and Tunisia: convey authority to an elected body that can claim the
mantle of popular will. But Iraq remains a
counterpoint. There, elections after the American invasion widened divisions so
dangerously that they helped unleash a civil war.
.... 'Where is the rule of law?' asked Ashraf al-Kiki, a vendor who had gone to a police
station, the Tripoli Military Council and a militia from Zintan in pursuit of compensation
after militiamen shot holes in his car. The scent of the kebab he grilled wafted over
speakers playing the national anthem. 'This is the rule of force, not the rule of law.'
The force at the Tripoli airport is the powerful militia from Zintan, a mountain town
south of the capital, which played a role in Tripoli’s fall and still
holds prisoner Colonel Qaddafi’s most prominent son, Seif al-Islam. By its count,
it has 1,000 men at the airport.... The militias are proving to be the scourge of the
revolution’s aftermath. Though they have dismantled most of their checkpoints in the
capital, they remain a force, here and elsewhere. A Human Rights Watch researcher
estimated there are 250 separate militias in the coastal city of Misurata, the scene of
perhaps the fiercest battle of the revolution. In recent months those militias have become
the most loathed in the country. .... On Jan. 19 ... Omar [Brebesh], a former Libyan
diplomat in Paris, was called in for questioning by militiamen from Zintan. The next day,
the family found his body at a hospital in Zintan. His nose was broken, as were his ribs.
The nails had been pulled from his toes, they said. His skull was fractured, and his body
bore signs of burns from cigarettes. The militia told the family that the men responsible
had been arrested, an assurance [Bashir] Brebesh [his son] said offered little
consolation. 'We feel we are alone,' he said. ...'They’re putting themselves as the
policeman, as the judge and as the executioner,' said Mr. Brebesh, 32, a neurology
resident in Canada, who came home after learning of his father’s death. He inhaled
deeply. 'Did they not have enough dignity to just shoot him in the head?' he asked.
'It’s so monstrous. Did they enjoy hearing him scream?' The government has acknowledged
the torture and detentions, but it admits that the police and Justice Ministry are not
up to the task of stopping them. On Tuesday, it sent out a text message on cellphones,
pleading for the militias to stop. 'People are
turning up dead in detention at an alarming rate,' said Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies
director at Human Rights Watch, who was compiling evidence in Libya last month. 'If this
was happening under any Arab dictatorship, there would be an outcry.' At the seaside base this week, the looting ended before midnight. Not
much was left at the compound, which once belonged to Colonel Qaddafi’s son Saadi
— a red beret, a car battery, a rusted ammunition case and an empty bottle of
Tunisian wine. But as on most nights, militias returned to contest other spots in the
city, demarcating their turf. Like a winter squall, their shooting thundered over the
Mediterranean seafront into the early hours. In the dark, no one could read the slogans in
Quds Square. 'Because the price was the blood of our children, let’s unify,
let’s show tolerance and let’s live together,' one read. In the dark, no one
knew who was firing. 'What’s wrong with them?' asked Mahmoud Mgairish. He stood near
the square the next morning, as a soft sun seemed to wash the streets. 'I don’t know
where this country is heading,' he went on. 'I swear to God, this will never get
untangled.'”
Libya Struggles to Curb Militias as Chaos Grows
New
York Times, 8 February 2012
"Fierce
clashes between two tribes in Libya's remote southeastern desert have killed more than 100
people over the past 10 days, tribal sources said on
Tuesday."
More than 100 'killed' in south Libya tribal clashes
AFP,
21 February 2012
"Libya’s
leader acknowledged Tuesday that his transitional government is powerless to control
militias that are refusing to lay down their arms after ousting Moammar Gadhafi as it
struggles to impose control over the oil-rich North African nation. ...
Abdul-Jalil said the governing National Transitional Council has made mistakes, but he
also criticized former rebels who have formed
powerful militias and
local governments that have emerged as rivals to the Tripoli-based central government that
assumed power after Gadhafi was ousted. 'Both are to blame,' he said. 'The governmental
program to integrate the militias is slow and the revolutionaries don’t trust
it....the country has been plagued by revenge attacks by those who suffered at the hands
of Gadhafi’s forces during the brutal civil war. Human rights groups have documented
reports of widespread torture and killings of detainees. Hundreds
of armed militias that fought against Gadhafi’s forces are the real power on the
ground in the country, wielding control over cities,
neighborhoods and borders while the transitional government has been unable to rein in
fighters, rebuild decimated institutions or stop widespread corruption.”
Libyan leader acknowledges government is powerless to control militias
Associated
Press, 21 February 2012
Replacing Dictatorship With Anarchy
How NATO Strengthened The Hand Of Al Qaeda In Libya And A Million People Fled
"After
Moammar Gadhafi's death, NATO saw its victory as complete. But as David Pugliese writes in
the last of a three-part series, Libya's new leaders are struggling to gain control and
al-Qaeda has benefitted from the power vacuum. - The
death of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi on Oct. 20 was greeted with relief in the capital
cities of NATO nations. His demise meant the war was all but over. In Ottawa, officials in
the Prime Minister's Office and the Privy Council Office went to work planning the largest
military victory parade the country had seen in decades. The Conservative government
wanted a major event: a flypast of CF-18 fighter jets and other aircraft, a parade, a
choir and a feting of hundreds military personnel in the Senate chambers. The emphasis was
on portraying all those who had taken part in the Libyan mission - from cooks to clerks to
pilots and aircrew - as 'heroes.' The PR campaign started with a press release issued Nov.
4 by the office of Defence Minister Peter MacKay, calling on Canadians to welcome their
'military heroes' back from the war's staging base in Italy. But even before Gadhafi's
death, the government had carefully crafted strategic messages to be used by military
officers and politicians in public and with the media when victory came in Libya. The main
one was that Canada had taken a leading role in the NATO campaign and had 'punched above
its weight.' NATO saw its victory as complete: 260 aircraft had flown more than 26,000
missions. Almost 6,000 targets, including tanks and other armoured vehicles, were
destroyed. More than 200 cruise missiles were fired and 20,000 bombs dropped. Canadian
CF-18s flew 946 sorties and dropped almost 700 bombs. Libya's air force was almost
entirely destroyed in the opening days of the war. More than 400 government buildings or
command centres were attacked. With all the self-congratulation about victory in Libya,
few in the Canadian government or military pointed out the obvious - that the thirdrate
army of an African state, outfitted with aging equipment, had somehow managed to withstand
the full force of some of the largest militaries in the world and hang on for more than
200 days. While the Canadian government celebrated Gadhafi's overthrow, the countries in
the region were feeling the effects. The Libyan strongman had not only provided aid for
many African nations, but employment for their citizens. His demise set into motion a mass
exodus of workers back to their original countries. That, in turn, created a domino effect
as those nations struggled to deal with hundreds of
thousands of traumatized and impoverished people,
according to a recently released UN report for the Security Council. Crime and drug and
human smuggling have spiked in the region and the
return of more than one million people to their homelands has worsened an 'already
challenging, humanitarian, development and security situation,' the report noted. But Gadhafi's
overthrow did breathe new life into one organization - al-Qaeda. As Gadhafi's forces retreated from NATO's relentless air attacks they
abandoned bases and ammunition depots holding thousands of weapons, including
surfaceto-air missiles. In the chaos that engulfed Libya, the sites were quickly pilfered,
either by rebels or black marketers. African nations were the first to sound the warning.
In late March, just weeks into the conflict, Chad's president, Idriss Deby Itno, told
journalists that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM as it is known, had obtained
missiles and small arms from abandoned Libyan stockpiles. 'This is very serious,' he said.
'AQIM is becoming a genuine army, the best equipped in the region.'...in Libya, the war
was over, but the fighting went on. The country's new leaders were dealing with their own
problems as rebel groups, representing various factions, started to fight each other for
control of the country. In Tripoli, rival groups fought gun battles over control of the
city's sports complex and airport. 'I want to assure the Libyan people that everything is
under control,' a Libyan senior official, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, said after one four-day
battle on the outskirts of the capital. But the
militias, estimated to number between 100 and 300 groups, aren't hearing the message.
Tripoli residents have seen a different face of the rebellion than the one presented to
the western media. Rebels have stopped people at gunpoint and stolen their vehicles. Other
militia groups have taken over homes and buildings, evicting families and businesses. The militia from Zintan stole an elephant from Tripoli's zoo, taking the
animal back to their city as a war trophy. The militias refuse to disarm and clashes
continue. It's estimated that around 125,000 Libyans have retained their weapons. A recent
report from the International Crisis Group pointed to one of the key problems: Libyans had
rejected the National Transitional Council. The group that the Canadian government
recognized as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people, long before Gadhafi's
regime fell, actually had little real power. Although the NTC was the face of the uprising
for western politicians and the media, those from the western part of the country saw it
as dominated by militia groups from the east. For their part, Islamists saw the
transitional council as overly secular, too geared to western values and out of touch with
ordinary Libyans, according the report....Equally
troubling for countries that supported the rebels was the ongoing widespread detention of
individuals and the use of torture in the new Libya. An estimated 8,500 men, women and
children are still being held in detention centres run by various militias. Navi Pillay,
the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, reported that the detainees were
being tortured and that both male and female prisoners were being raped. In January,
Médecins sans Frontières pulled its medical staff from detention facilities in Misrata
after they determined more than 100 people had been tortured. The group's doctors were
being asked to keep prisoners alive so they could be tortured again."
A victory, but at what price?
Ottawa
Citizen, 20 February 2012
"Members of Colonel Gaddafi's former
government outside Libya say they are starting a political movement aimed at radical
change, the BBC has learnt. In a message which appears to be genuine, one of Gaddafi's
senior officials said they wanted to prevent the
outbreak of another civil war.....In a statement
posted on several websites the group said the situation in Libya 'is becoming worse every day.
There's very little
interest from the international media in the many horrors
that have taken place. We are reorganising ourselves
outside Libya in an inclusive political movement that would encompass all Libyans who
understand the terrible reality of Libya,' it said."
Gaddafi supporters outside Libya form new grouping
BBC Online, 17 February 2012
'We Did It To
Protect The Libyan People, Not The Libyan Oil Fields, Really We Did'
You won't see too much of this on your TV because the Libyan people have
been left to their own fate as NATO moves its focus to regime change in Syria. Tripoli now
has to try and cope with being one of the world's most dangerous cities after being one of
the safest under Gaddafi. |
"Formerly
one of the world’s safest cities (except for political dissidents), Tripoli is now one of
its most volatile and dangerous with everyone, including teenagers, seemingly in
possession of a looted AK47 or two or three."
An acute shortage of everything but guns as Gaddafi offer to negotiate rejected (print
heading) - P6
London Times, Print Edition, 29 August 2011, P6 |
So Who Threatens Whom Exactly?
Unlike NATO Iran Has Not Invaded Anyone In 200 Years
Why The Rush To War With Iran?
"They
don't give up. After a decade of blood-drenched failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, violent
destabilisation of Pakistan and Yemen, the devastation of Lebanon and slaughter in Libya,
you might hope the US and its friends had had their fill of invasion and intervention in
the Muslim world. It seems not. For months the
evidence has been growing that a US-Israeli stealth war against Iran has already begun,
backed by Britain and France. Covert support for armed opposition groups has spread into a
campaign of assassinations of Iranian scientists, cyber warfare, attacks on military and
missile installations, and the killing of an Iranian general, among others. The attacks
are not directly acknowledged, but accompanied by intelligence-steered nods and winks as
the media are fed a stream of hostile tales – the most outlandish so far being an alleged
Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US – and the western powers
ratchet up pressure for yet more sanctions over Iran's nuclear programme.... Last month
the Guardian was told by British defence ministry officials that if the US brought forward
plans to attack Iran (as they believed it might), it would 'seek, and receive, UK military
help', including sea and air support and permission to use the ethnically cleansed British
island colony of Diego Garcia. Whether the officials' motive was to soften up public
opinion for war or warn against it, this was an extraordinary admission: the Britain
military establishment fully expects to take part in an unprovoked US attack on Iran
– just as it did against Iraq eight years ago. What was dismissed by the former
foreign secretary Jack Straw as 'unthinkable', and for
David Cameron became an option not to be taken 'off the table', now turns out to be as
good as a done deal if the US decides to launch a war
that no one can seriously doubt would have disastrous
consequences. But there has been no debate in
parliament and no mainstream political challenge to what Straw's successor, David
Miliband, this week called the danger
of 'sleepwalking into a war with Iran'. That's all the more shocking because the case
against Iran is so spectacularly flimsy. There is in fact no reliable evidence that Iran
is engaged in a nuclear weapons programme.... The whole campaign has an Alice in
Wonderland quality about it. Iran, which says it doesn't want nuclear weapons, is
surrounded by nuclear-weapon states: the US – which also has forces in neighbouring
Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as military bases across the region – Israel, Russia,
Pakistan and India. Iran is of course an
authoritarian state, though not as repressive as western allies such as Saudi Arabia. But
it has invaded no one in 200 years. It was itself invaded by Iraq with western support in the 1980s, while
the US and Israel have attacked 10 countries or territories between them in the past decade. Britain exploited, occupied and
overthrew governments in Iran for over a century. So who
threatens who exactly?"
War on Iran has already begun. Act before it threatens all of us
Guardian,
7 December 2011
Hiding Behind Israel In A US
Presidential Election Year?
Mixed Messages From The Obama Administration As Israel Prepares For War
"Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said
Thursday that U.S. intelligence shows Iran is enriching uranium in a disputed nuclear
program but that Tehran has not made a decision on
whether to proceed with development of an atomic bomb.
Panetta says Iran
enriching uranium but no decision yet on proceeding with a nuclear weapon.... Testifying before the Senate
Armed Services Committee, National Intelligence
Director James Clapper said the decision on a nuclear weapon would be made by Iran’s
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, raising questions about the role of Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the process.... Clapper
said it’s 'technically feasible' that Tehran could produce a nuclear weapon in one or
two years if its leaders decide to build one, 'but
practically not likely.'"
Panetta says Iran enriching uranium but no decision yet on proceeding with a
nuclear weapon
Associated
Press, 16 February 2012
"Secretary
of Defense Leon Panetta believes
that Israel could attack Iran in an April-to-June timeframe, and there apparently has been a decision made for the U.S. to
help in an assault on the radical Islamic nation’s nuclear facilities. U.S. military sources tell WND that the Pentagon has begun preparations
for 'a number of operational plans and counter-operations,' with a Feb. 22 due date for
submitting the plans. There also is a request for
identifying U.S. forces 'by 1 March with a ‘through’ date of October.' The military sources indicated that U.S. forces will be augmented by an
Aegis warship, presumably one of the two in the U.S. carrier task forces scheduled to be
in the Persian Gulf. The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln carrier task force already has re-entered
the Gulf.The Aegis combat system on U.S. Navy ships is used to track and guide weapons to
destroy intended targets and to act as a protective shield to counter ballistic missile
threats.... Until now, the Obama administration has stated that it doesn’t want to be
involved in any conflict with Iran unless U.S. assets are attacked – in which case
there would be a strong U.S. response. The apparent
U.S. war plans, based on what U.S. military sources tell WND, suggest that the U.S. may
not wait for an attack on U.S. assets before responding and instead may be preparing to
assist the Israelis in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities."
U.S. military told to prepare for Iran ops
WorldNetDaily,
16 Feburary 2012
Risking World War Over The So-Called Iranian 'Threat'
"We are hearing a new concept these
days in discussions about Iran — the zone
of immunity. The idea, often
explained by Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, is that soon Iran will have
enough nuclear capability that Israel would not be able to inflict a crippling blow to its
program. In fact, while the specifics are fresh, this is not a new strategic concept at
all. Nations have often believed that they face a closing window to act, and almost always
such thinking has led to disaster. The most famous example, of course, was Germany’s
decision to start what became World War I. The German General Staff believed that Russia — its archenemy
— was rearming on a scale that would soon nullify Germany’s superior military
strength. The Germans believed that within two years — by 1916 — Russia would
have a significant, and perhaps unbeatable, strategic advantage. As a result, when
turmoil began in the Balkans in June 1914, Germany decided to act while it had the
advantage. To stop Russia from entering a 'zone of immunity,' Germany invaded France
(Russia’s main ally) and Belgium, which forced British entry into the war, thus setting in motion a two-front European war that lasted four
years and resulted in more than 37 million casualties.....
it is profoundly shortsighted to base a major decision — to go to war — on
narrow technical considerations like windows of vulnerability. Many in Washington in March
2003 insisted that we could not wait for nuclear inspectors to keep at their work in Iraq
because we faced a closing window — the weather was going to get too hot by June and
July to send in U.S. forces. As a result, we rushed into a badly planned military invasion
and occupation in which soldiers had to endure combat in Iraq for nine long and very hot
years. ..... Israeli officials explain that we Americans cannot understand their fears,
that Iran is an existential threat to them. But in fact we can understand because we have
gone through a very similar experience ourselves. After World
War II, as the Soviet Union approached a nuclear
capability, the United States was seized by a panic that lasted for years. Everything that Israel says about Iran now, we said about the
Soviet Union. We saw it as a radical, revolutionary
regime, opposed to every value we held dear, determined to overthrow the governments of
the Western world in order to establish global communism. We saw Moscow as irrational,
aggressive and utterly unconcerned with human life. After all, Joseph Stalin had just
sacrificed a mind-boggling 26 million Soviet lives in his country’s struggle against
Nazi Germany. Just as Israel is openly considering
preemptive strikes against Iran, many in the West urged such strikes against Moscow in the
late 1940s. The calls came not just from hawks but
even from lifelong pacifists such as the public intellectual Bertrand Russell..... In the end, however, the global revolutionaries in Moscow, the mad
autocrats in Pyongyang and the terrorist-supporting military in Pakistan have all been
deterred by mutual fears of destruction. While the Iranian
regime is often called crazy, it has done much less to merit the term than did a regime
such as Mao’s China. Over the past decade, there have been thousands of suicide
bombings by Saudis, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Pakistanis, but not been a
single suicide attack by an Iranian. Is the Iranian
regime — even if it got one crude device in a few years — likely to launch the
first?"
How history lessons could deter Iranian aggression
Washington
Post, 16 February 2012
Why Might Non-NATO Countries Want Nuclear Arms?
Because It's The Most Reliable Way To Stop NATO's 'Free Exercise Of Violence'
Deployed Since The End Of The Soviet Union
John Bolton,
Former Bush Administration Ambassador To The United Nations |
"Well, I think all of these
efforts are doomed to failure and in fact the consequence of increasing the sanctions is
simply to persuade Iran to finish — to get on with the business of finishing its
nuclear weapon, putting it in the position of North Korea which we know has exploded two
nuclear devices, which makes it a lot less likely
— in fact, probably makes it impossible to believe we would attack North Korea because of the fear of nuclear
retaliation. So I think this is going to a very,
very difficult year and I think, honestly, that half-measures like assassinations or
sanctions are only going to produce the crisis more quickly. The better way to prevent
Iran from getting nuclear weapons is to attack its nuclear weapons program directly, break
their control over the nuclear fuel cycle."
John Bolton, former Bush Administration Ambassador to the United Nations
Fox
TV, 11 January 2011 |
"In the United States, before the massive
propaganda campaigns of the past few years, a majority of the population agreed with most
of the world that, as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has a right to
carry out uranium enrichment. And even today, a large majority favors peaceful means for
dealing with Iran. There is even strong opposition to military engagement if Iran and
Israel are at war. Only a quarter regard Iran as an important concern for the US
altogether. But it is not unusual for there to be a gap, often a chasm, dividing public
opinion and policy. Why exactly is Iran regarded as
such a colossal threat? The question is rarely discussed, but
it is not hard to find a serious answer – though not, as usual, in the fevered
pronouncements. The most authoritative answer is provided by the Pentagon and the
intelligence services in their regular reports to Congress on global security. They report
that Iran does not pose a military threat. Its military spending is very low even by the
standards of the region, minuscule,
of course, in comparison with the US. Iran has little capacity to deploy force. Its
strategic doctrines are defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to
set it. If Iran is developing nuclear weapons capability, they report, that would be part
of its deterrence strategy. No serious analyst believes that the ruling clerics are eager to see their
country and possessions vaporized, the immediate consequence of their coming even close to
initiating a nuclear war. And it is hardly necessary to spell out the
reasons why any Iranian leadership would be concerned with deterrence, under existing
circumstances. The regime is doubtless a serious threat to much of its own population
– and regrettably, is hardly unique on that score. But the primary threat to the US and Israel is that Iran might deter their free exercise of violence."
Noam
Chomsky, Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and
Philosophy
The Imperial Way
Guardian,
Comment Is Free, 15 February 2012
Why Does NATO Want A Free Hand To Deploy Violence In
Islamic Countries?
'It's The Oil Stupid'
From The
Horse's Mouth - These Wars Are For Oil
John Bolton, Former Bush Administration Ambassador To The United Nations |
"Well, Iran has
made little secret of its desire to gain hegemony in the region of the Persian Gulf, the critical oil and natural gas producing region that we fought so many wars to try
and protect our economy from the adverse impact of losing that supply or having it
available only at very high prices..."
John Bolton, former Bush Administration Ambassador to the UN
Fox News, 22 October 2011 |
Our 'Humanitarian' Values - Getting 'The Full Meal'
Standing In
The Way Of 'The Full Meal' The Real Iranian 'Threat'
The New Tehran Allied Government In Iraq Is Not Playing 'Oil' Ball Following US Troop
Withdrawal |
"Exxon Mobil is being shut out of
bidding on the next round of oil and gas exploration contracts in Iraq because of its
decision to sign an exploration deal with Kurdistan's regional government in the northern
part of that country. Iraq's decision, confirmed by a spokesman for Deputy Prime Minster
for Energy Hussein al-Shahristani on Monday, is not a surprise. Iraq has plans to increase
its oil production capacity to about 12 million barrels a day by the end of 2017 from
current capacity of just over 3 million barrels a day. But
so far it has not been willing to share the profits with the western oil companies doing
business in Iraq, limiting their take to about $2 a barrel, no matter the market price,
said Fadel Gheit, oil analyst with Oppenheimer.... A
couple of years ago, the newly formed Iraqi government began awarding big contracts to the
world's major oil companies including France's Total, England's BP, China's CNPC and
Russia's Lukoil, as well as Royal Dutch Shell, Occidental, and Marathon, in an effort to
boost its nascent production. 'Nobody is making money
there,' Gheit said. 'They all hope to make a lot of money, but so far they have seen only
the appetizer, not the full meal.'"
Iraq Blocks Exxon Mobil Exploration Bids
CNN, 13 February 2012 |
Why Should Iran Trust NATO?
Its Leading Members Have Never Been Trustworthy
"Fifty years ago this week, the CIA and the British SIS
orchestrated a coup d'etat that toppled the democratically
elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The prime minister and his nationalist supporters in parliament
roused Britain's ire when they nationalised the oil industry in 1951, which had previously
been exclusively controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company [later renamed as BP].
Mossadegh argued that Iran should begin profiting from its vast oil reserves. The British
government tried to enlist the Americans in planning a coup... The crushing of Iran's first democratic government
ushered in more than two decades of dictatorship under the Shah... The author of All the Shah's Men, New York Times
reporter Stephen Kinzer, argues that the
coup planted the seeds of resentment against the US in the Middle East, ultimately leading to the events of September 11.... The coup and
the culture of covert interference it created forever changed how the world viewed the US,
especially in poor, oppressive countries. For many
Iranians, the coup was a tragedy from which their country has never recovered."
The spectre of Operation Ajax
Guardian, 20 August
2003
'Operation
Ajax'
In 1954 a CIA officer wrote a
classified official account of the Anglo-American orchestrated coup d'etat in Iran in 1953
known as 'Operation Ajax'.
Nearly fifty years later classified CIA documentation on this episode was leaked to the New
York Times which published it in 2000. One document is entitled 'Appendix B' and
details proposed American and British planning for the operation. (It is available on the web site
of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Also available is
a general narrative explaining these matters on the web site
of the New York Times).
Amongst other measures, these
proposals included provision for the funding of opposition groups in Iran, the mustering
of thousands of street activists, the bribery of Iranian members of parliament, the
publication of fabricated documents and of anti-government propaganda, and the conducting of staged attacks on Iranians to be falsely blamed on the
incumbent government in order to turn the population against
it. An extract from the Appendix follows below.
Although his regime is not comparable
to Mossadeq's democratic government (Iran's first), some of these methods are also likely
to have been deployed against President Assad during the Syrian crisis of 2011/12. In both
cases (one aimed at toppling a democracy, the other a dictatorship) the aim was 'regime
change'. What both had in common was the goal of replacing an existing Middle Eastern
government that was not compliant with western economic interests.
Though today they can be dressed up
in the clothes of other claimed concerns (e.g. 'humanitarian') those interests continue to
centre around oil, and in that respect particularly around Iran. Syria is currently being
targeted because of its alliance with Iran, which controls fully one half of the shoreline
of the Persian Gulf.
As demonstrated by continuing western
support for the (anti-Iranian Sunni) dictatorship in
Bahrain, which suppressed a
popular uprising with support from western armed Saudi Arabia in 2011, it is compliant
governments in general (whether democracies or dictatorships) in the Middle East that NATO
is seeking, rather than democratic ones in particular.
This struggle has being going on,
since the original Operation Ajax in 1953, for well over over half a century. It arises
because of the failure of the western world to develop alternative
energy technology to reduce its economic dependence on oil as the primary basis of its
transport systems. |
Appendix
B
'London' Draft
of the TPAJAX Operational Plan
(Classified Document Obtained By The New York Times
Relating To 1953 Coup D'etat In Iran) |
"Phase
2 - A massive propaganda campaign against Mossadeq
and his government but with Mossadeq as the principle target. This will begin only a week
or two before the climax of Situation A so as not to offer too much time for a sharp reaction by Mossadeq and so
that the impact will not be dispersed by being long drawn out. ... Phase 3. Phase 3 - This is Situation A which is
described in full in a following paragraph.... At Headquarters and at the [CIA]
field station US personnel will draft and put
into Persian the texts for articles, broadsheets and pamphlets, some pro-Shah and some
anti-Mossadeq. The material designed to discredit Mossadeq will hammer the following
themes.... [including] Mossadeq is an enemy of Islam ..... the British group can muster up to
approximately 3,000 street activists to be committed to Situation
A.... It is our belief that nearly all the important
religious leaders with large followings are firmly opposed to Mossadeq. Both the US field
station and the British group have firm contacts with such leaders. These leaders
include... ***** [name redacted] and his terrorist
gang......The
terrorist group [is] to threaten that they are ready
to take direct action against pro-Mossadeq deputies and members of Mossadeq's entourage
and government... [They will ensure] full participation of themselves and followers in Situation A.... the pre-coup
activities of the organization as described above will be primarily for the purpose of
creating Situation A which is described below. (1) On the
appointed day, staged attacks
will be made against respected religious leaders in Tehran. (2) Other religious leaders will at once say that these attacks were ordered by Mossadeq as his reaction to the disfavor in which his government is held by the
religious leaders of the entire country. (3) A
number of the more important leaders will at once take sanctuary in the Majlis [i.e.
Iranian parliament] grounds.(4) At this time, these religious leaders will release
statements through their followers denouncing in the strongest terms the anti-religious
attitude and behavior of Mossadeq. (5) At the same time as 2.b.(4) 9 (d) above, the
fullest publicity will be given to the US station fabricated
documents which prove and record in detail a secret
agreement between Mossadeq and the Tudeh, with the latter promising to use all their force
in support of Mossadeq and against the religious leaders, the Army, and the police. (6)
Simultaneously, these leaders will call on their followers to take sanctuary all over
Tehran in mosques, telegraph and post offices, banks, etc. The British group and the US station will
supply all the demonstrators they can to swell their ranks...." |
The Syria-Iran Crisis
NATO Brings Humanity To The Brink Of World War
Bringing
Nuclear Armed China And Pakistan Into The Conflict |
"Iran's Crude Oil is once again targeted by the US as it spruces up to tighten
its financial sanctions in a move to deter buyers of Iranian oil. China, has meanwhile
threatened a third world war if the US does not stay away from Iran. The US has been
stepping up pressure after a report from the IAEA suggested that Iran may be developing
nuclear weapons. Iran has rubbished the allegations by stating that the nuclear technology
is being developed only for peaceful purposes. Oil is Iran's main source of revenue and
pumped in $56 billion in the first 7 months of 2011, as per data by the Energy Department.
As such, sanction on buying of Oil will strain the Iranian economy, the US believes.
France has also stepped forward to suggest that the EU stop all crude oil imports from
Iran. The EU is however split on a decision. In spite of all the sanctions of the West,
crude oil is an important commodity and it is impossible to think that Iran, the third
largest Crude Oil exporter, will have a hard time in finding buyers for Oil.
Asia, especially China and India have increased their imports from Iran. The Chinese
customs expect Iran to be the second largest crude supplier to China in 2011. India,
meanwhile, has routed payments through Turkey after finding it difficult to pay for Iran's
crude oil through Europe. The aggression of the West has been met with strong words from
both Russia and China, who have been warning of any attacks on Iran. A Chinese television reported China's Major
General Zhang Zhaozhong as saying that China will not hesitate to protect Iran even
with a Third World War in order
to safeguard its domestic political needs."
Crude oil: US sanctions against Iran and China’s call for WW III
Commodity
Online, 1 December 2011
"French President Nicolas Sarkozy
warned Friday that any foreignmilitary intervention
against Iran’s nuclear programme would trigger 'war and chaos' across the Middle East
and beyond....'A military intervention would not
solve the problem but would unleash war and chaos in the Middle East and perhaps, alas, the world,' he warned."
Intervention in Iran ‘would trigger war’: France’s Sarkozy
Agence
France-Presse, 20 January 2012
"Another signal that Washington has a
new war on its agenda is the raised level of Washington’s rhetoric.... In my
judgment, the US government’s war preparations are driven by three factors.... [the] third factor is to deter or
slow China’s rise as a
military and economic power by controlling China’s access to energy. It was China’s oil investments in eastern Libya that led to the sudden move
against Libya by the US and its NATO puppets, and it is China’s oil investments elsewhere in Africa that resulted in the Bush
regime’s creation of the United States Africa Command, designed to counter China’s economic influence with US
military influence. China has
significant energy investments in Iran, and a substantial percentage of China’s oil imports are from Iran.
Depriving China of independent
access to oil is Washington’s way of restraining and boxing in China. What we are witnessing is a replay of
Washington’s policy toward Japan in the 1930s that provoked the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor. Japan’s bank balances in the West were seized, and Japan’s access
to oil and raw materials was restricted. The purpose was to prevent or to slow
Japan’s rise. The result was [world] war."
Paul Craig Roberts - Former Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury for Economic Policy and Associate Editor for The Wall St Journal
The Next War on Washington’s Agenda
Institute
For Political Economy, 11 January 2012
"Is
the world counting down to 'D-Day'? After US
Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta estimated that Israel would attack Iran
by June, and Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu warned government officials against 'Iran
chatter,' A European diplomat based in Pakistan
said that if Israel attacks, Islamabad will have no choice but to support any Iranian
retaliation. The
diplomat's statement raised the specter of putting a nuclear-armed Pakistan at odds with Israel,
which is widely believed to have its own significant nuclear arsenal."
'Israeli attack will prompt Pakistani response'
Ynetnews (Israel), 5
February 2012 |
'Count-Down' To Catastrophe
"Conventional wisdom has it that
America or Israel are far too sensible to go to war with Iran over the country’s
military nuclear programme. The consequences are too grave for all concerned. ... Mr Obama
stands accused by Republican rivals of being soft on Iran. Mitt Romney, a leading
Republican presidential candidate, has accused him of an 'appeasement strategy' and called
for 'regime change in Iran'. ... Mr Netanyahu has made it clear that he will act rather than let Iran acquire
a nuclear bomb. Israel has been training for
the operation. A recent poll revealed that
43 per cent of Israelis support an attack on Iran, with 41 per cent against. In this explosive atmosphere anything is possible."
Roger Beeston - Environment is explosive – and fools could rush in
London Times, 8 December 2011, Print Edition P39
"Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a
lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown
of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest
worry is the growing possibility that Israel
will attack Iran over the next few months. Panetta believes there is a strong
likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June — before Iran enters
what Israelis described as a 'zone of immunity' to commence building a nuclear bomb. Very
soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep
underground facilities to make a weapon — and only the United States could then stop
them militarily. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t want to leave the
fate of Israel dependent on American action, which would be triggered by intelligence that
Iran is building a bomb, which it hasn’t done yet. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud
Barak may have signaled the prospect of an Israeli attack soon when he asked last month to
postpone a planned U.S.-Israel military exercise that would culminate in a live-fire phase
in May. Barak apologized that Israel couldn’t
devote the resources to the annual exercise this spring. President Obama and Panetta are
said to have cautioned the Israelis that the United States opposes an attack, believing
that it would derail an increasingly successful international economic sanctions program
and other non-military efforts to stop Iran from crossing the threshold. But the White
House hasn’t yet decided precisely how the United States would respond if the
Israelis do attack. The Obama administration is conducting intense discussions about what
an Israeli attack would mean for the United States: whether Iran would target U.S. ships
in the region or try to close the Strait of Hormuz; and what effect the conflict and a
likely spike in oil prices would have on the fragile global economy. The administration
appears to favor staying out of the conflict unless Iran hits U.S. assets, which would
trigger a strong U.S. response. This U.S. policy — signaling that Israel is acting on
its own — might open a breach like the one in 1956, when President Dwight Eisenhower
condemned an Israeli-European attack on the Suez Canal. Complicating matters is the 2012
presidential campaign, which has Republicans candidates clamoring for stronger U.S.
support of Israel.... U.S. officials don’t think that Netanyahu has made a final
decision to attack, and they note that top Israeli intelligence officials remain skeptical
of the project. But senior Americans doubt that the
Israelis are bluffing. They’re worrying about the guns of spring — and the
unintended consequences."
Is Israel preparing to attack Iran?
Washington
Post, 2 February 2012
"Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu warned Friday against a possible strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities,
saying it would be catastrophic for the region'. A military strike is a disaster. It should not be an
option,' he said during an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies.”
Turkey FM warns against strike on Iran
Jerusalem Post,
Reuters 12 February 2012
"Syndicated columnist and political
commentator, Charles Krauthammer, appeared on FOX
News over the weekend, addressing the issue of a
possible Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities prior to the American general
elections. He saw it as inevitable. Referring to the recent remarks made
by United States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that an Israeli attack is likely to
occur in the coming months, Krauthammer asserted, 'Our own Secretary of Defense has said
it’s highly likely, and he gave a timeframe — April, May, June — which means
the Israelis think that the moment, the zone of immunity where they can no longer attack
successfully, is approaching.'”
Krauthammer: Israel Will Not Tolerate Threats of Annihilation
Arutz Sheva
(Israel), 12 February 2012
"The war in Syria may eventually make
the war in Iraq look like a mere warm-up for the main act. Its
collapse could create a vortex...."
A powder keg of power politics
London Times, 13 February 2012, Print Edition, P29
An
Israeli Strike Against Iran Is Presumed To Require Tacit US Consent
In A US Presidential Election Year The Answer May Be 'No' In Public But 'Yes'
In Private |
"Mossad
chief Tamir Pardo's secret
visit to Washington earlier this month was meant to gauge how the administration of
U.S. President Barack Obama would react to an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear
program. The Daily Beast reported on Monday. Pardo's
visit was exposed last month by Haaretz after top U.S. officials mentioned his
participation in a series of meetings in Washington at a public hearing in the Senate.
During the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing , in which CIA Director David
Petraeus and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper participated, panel
chairperson Dianne Feinstein asked Clapper whether or not Israel intended to strike Iran's
nuclear facilities. Clapper responded that he would
rather discuss the issue behind closed doors.
Feinstein then indicated that she had met Pardo earlier in the week in Washington.
Petraeus responded that he had also met with Pardo, and cited what he called Israel's
growing concern over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The entire exchange was broadcasted live on
American television. On Monday, a report in The Daily
Beast, which cited U.S. officials, shed some light on the visit, saying the Mossad chief
had visited the U.S. in order to determine how the U.S. would react if Israel attacked
Iran's nuclear program despite U.S. objections.
According to U.S. officials cited in the report, Pardo asked top American officials
questions such as : 'What is our posture on Iran? Are we ready to bomb? Would we [do so
later]? What does it mean if [Israel] does it anyway?' The report added that Israel
has ceased sharing a 'significant' amount of intelligence concerning its military
preparations with the U.S."
Report: Mossad chief's secret U.S. visit meant to gauge American response to Israeli
attack on Iran
Haaretz
(Israel), 13 February 2012 |
"Dealing
with the Iranian nuclear programme is a 'crisis coming down the tracks' which could lead
to military conflict in the Middle East, the Foreign Secretary warns. ...Mr Hague repeatedly stressed
that 'all options must remain on the table' when confronting the Iranian regime, despite
Liberal Democrat concerns that the Government may be dragged into another military
conflict.... The
Foreign Secretary spoke out over the growing crisis amid speculation that Israel may be
preparing to launch missile strikes against Iranian missile facilities in the run-up to
the US presidential Election in the autumn. He will
discuss the growing crisis in Parliament on Monday. Western diplomats believe that the
Israelis are calculating that they have to destroy the Iranian facilities this year,
before they are hidden too deep underground and while the election puts Barack Obama under
added pressure to support the action. American intelligence chiefs were this week forced
to announce that 'to the best of their knowledge' Israel was not poised to launch an
attack. But Western officials believe an Israeli
strike is likely over the summer. .... In
today’s interview, Mr Hague says that the British Government has urged Israel not to
strike. He said that Iran being 'attacked militarily'
would have 'enormous downsides'."
Iran risks nuclear Cold War
Telegraph,
17 February 2012
"Tom Donilon, the US president's top
security aide, arrived in Tel Aviv on Saturday morning for three days of meetings with
Israeli defence and security chiefs. While Washington claims the visit is simply the
latest in a series of 'regular, high level consultations between the United States and
Israel', it came just days after coordinated attacks launched against Israeli embassies
across the world provoked outrage in Jerusalem, which claims with certainly that Iran is
responsible. Israel'soption
of launching a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities was expected to be the urgent topic of
discussion during Mr Donilon's visit. Hours before he arrived Iran's navy claimed its
warships entered the Mediterranean to show its 'might' to regional countries. In recent
weeks, Israeli government officials have remained resolutely tight-lipped on their
position on the Iranian threat but a string of high-ranking US officials have expressed
the belief that Israel is preparing to act, with or without American support. A senior US
security official arrived in Israel on Saturday as international tension over Iran's
nuclear development reached an all-time high. The rising
tensions came as Foreign Secretary William Hague warned in Saturday's edition of The Daily
Telegraph of the danger of a nuclear Cold War in the Middle East because of Iran's nuclear
programme. Mr Donilon's visit follows a trip by Mossad chief Tamir Pardo to Washington in
December to discuss the possibility of military action against Iran, in which the security
chief asked his counterparts in the CIA what the US reaction would be to an independent
Israeli attack on Tehran. In an interview with the
New York Times late last year, Ehud Barak, Israel's minister of defence, suggested that an
Israeli strike on Iran is all but inevitable.
General Uzi Eilam, a former director general of Israel's ministry of defence, revealed
earlier this week that he may be 'among the only ones [Israeli defence officials]' who
does not think a strike is necessary....Leon Panetta,
the US defence secretary, has indicated in his clearest terms yet that Washington will act
to prevent a nuclear Iran and will not tolerate it
if Iran attempts to block the Straits of Hormuz, a naval trade route supplying one fifth
of the world's oil. 'We, the United States, have all options on the table,' he
said.'"
Obama sends top security aide to Israel as tension builds over nuclear Iran
Telegraph,
18 February 2012
"The question in not whether to stop
Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, but how.... A pincer
movement points to early autumn as a deadline: any attack has to happen before the
Iranians are already too far advanced and while President Barack Obama is still on the
campaign trail."
Slowing The Countdown To War
Sunday Times, 19 February 2012, Print Edition, P22
"A
senior Iranian lawmaker says the presence of Iranian and Russian naval forces in
Syria’s coastal waters is a clear warning to the US to refrain from any possible
military adventurism. 'The United States should take
Iran's warning about [refraining from any possible] military intervention in Syria
seriously,' Hossein Ebrahimi, deputy chairman of Iran Majlis National Security and Foreign
Policy Committee, said Sunday. He added that in the event of a US strategic mistake in
Syria, Washington may receive a crushing response from Iran, Syria and a few other
countries. On Sunday, January 8, a large Russian navy flotilla led by an aircraft carrier
arrived at the Syrian port of Tartus in the Mediterranean Sea for a six-day port call, to
show Moscow's solidarity with Damascus. 'The port call is aimed at bringing the two
countries closer together and strengthening their ties of friendship,' the official SANA
news agency quoted a Russian naval officer Yakushin Vladimir Anatolievich as saying. Two
Iranian Navy ships also docked in the Syrian port of Tartus on Friday, February 17, to
train Syrian naval forces under an agreement signed between Tehran and Damascus one year
ago. 'Syrians are against any form of foreign intervention in their country, but the
United States by arming opposition groups is trying to harm the [anti-Israeli] axis of
resistance in the region [in order to] affect Islamic Awakening in regional countries,'
Ebrahimi added."
Iran, Russia naval presence in Syrian waters message to US: MP
Press TV (Iran), 19 February 2012
"General Martin Dempsey, chairman of
the US joint chiefs of staff, said in a television interview that it was 'not prudent at
this point' to attack Iran, and 'a strike at this time would be destabilising'. But in a comment likely to fuel speculation about Israel's
military plans, he added: 'I wouldn't suggest we've persuaded them that our view is the
correct view.' The two countries were having a
'candid, collaborative conversation' which was continuing, he said....Asked by the CNN
interviewer Fareed Zakaria whether he would bet on Israel not launching an attack, Dempsey
replied: 'Fortunately I'm not a betting man.'...Later this week the US director of
national intelligence, James Clapper, will arrive for talks with Netanyahu, Barak and the
chief of Israel's intelligence agency.... Netanyahu is scheduled to visit the US next
month to attend the annual conference of the pro-Israel lobby group Aipac. He is expected
to meet Obama while in Washington."
US military chief cautions against Israeli attack on Iran
Guardian,
19 February 2012
"MPs have voted to support the
government in its decision not to rule out military
force against Iran, as ministers seek to increase
pressure on Tehran over the country's nuclear ambitions. The vote came at the end of a
debate on a backbench motion, tabled by Conservative MP John Baron, which urged the
government to rule out the use of force against Iran. Opening the debate on 20 February
2012, Mr Baron argued that military action in the
region would be 'counter-productive'. ... MPs overwhelmingly voted to
support ministers and amend Mr Baron's motion, despite a one-line whip giving them the
freedom to vote against the government if they wished to do so."
MPs back government over Iran
BBC
Online, 21 February 2012
'We Are Making These Logical
Inferences Because We Have A Solution'
The Time For A Change In Direction Is Now
"As Dennis Loo points out in his book,
Globalization and the Demolition of Society (2011),
the 4,801 Americans killed in action in Iraq leaves
out the 50,000 suicides of veterans and active duty US troops.
The truth of the matter is that the [American] casualties of
the Iraq war are as high as those of the Vietnam war."
Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for
Economic Policy
and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal
Information Clearing
House, 6 January 2012
Back In Both 1999 And 2001 The World Was Given Clear
Notice
Of The Disastrous Consequences Of The Path Of Violence Chosen By NATO
| 'We
Have A Solution' |
An
Early Warning Of Escalating Violence
1999 - 'Your City Could Be Next'
"The danger to the world
posed by NATO’s bombardment [of Yugoslavia] is terrifying. It has set an example to
every nation in the world — if you don’t like another country, and they
won’t obey you, then bomb them and destroy them.… Now bombardment can happen to any country in the world at any time. This
is the reality — your city could be next. Therefore, can we wait even a
single moment to establish world peace? - What is Happening In Yugoslavia Can Happen to
Any Nation at Any Time - Can you imagine if bombs began to fall on Washington D.C., and to
destroy the high-rises of the money markets of New
York? Will NATO be able to prevent this? When this
happens it will be beyond the power even of the
wealthy to save the situation."
Public Announcement
Published On 12 April
1999 In The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune Of Europe And The
Financial Times Of London
The Logical Inferences
2001 - NATO's Response To 9/11 Risks Triggering
World War
"When
negotiations and the use of arms have failed to maintain peace in the family of nations,
it is not wise to continue to pursue the path of failure. It is completely possible for
the USA to take revenge against terrorists and continue to crush terrorism, month after
month, and year after year, but the net result will be a chain of destruction from both
sides. Remember, the US government rose against
Hitler in order to stop destruction. Is it wise now for the USA to play the role of Hitler
and initiate a world-wide destructive program? We
would never like to compare President Bush with Hitler, but if the World War starts from this, what else could be the interpretation? Every military chief who waged a war at any time put forward very valid
reasons to wage war. But it is the act of war that is devastating to the world. It
doesn’t matter who plays the role of so-called bravery. In the beginning, when Hitler started his war, all of Germany was with him. Only the outside forces were there to counterbalance his wild fury. With the US government and the allies of NATO on one side, and the terrorists on the other side, life on earth —
whether it is American life, Chinese life, Afghani life, or any life — will be burned
in flames. Can brave Americans think how much of
America and the allied countries will also be burned in this fierce competition of
destruction from both sides? In this case, destruction will be the fate of both sides
— terrorists and those who call themselves peacekeepers. Can the prevailing national
defense system of any country save that country today from space-based warfare, chemical
warfare, biological warfare, information warfare, guided missile warfare, suicidal
attacks, and any other destructive system of warfare where the enemy is seen or unseen? If the government and people of the USA think they can destroy
terrorism by starting to destroy terrorists, they should understand that any step in the
direction of destruction will have destructive repercussions and will only help to create
waves of destruction in time. This is a universal
Law of Nature — action and reaction — 'As you sow, so shall you reap.' It is a matter of truthfully facing the facts. The President of the US and the people of all the NATO alliance countries
should understand that any war, anywhere, by anyone, will make the reality of war
perpetual, as it has been throughout the ages. Wisdom
in this scientific age demands eliminating the cause of all wars. We are making these logical inferences because we have a solution...... Many times in
the past we made appeals to the wealthy. There was no answer to our call. Now a global war is hanging
over our heads, and we are
inviting the leadership of the world to create an endowment fund for a permanent group of
peace creators...."
Public Announcement
Published On 23 September 2001 In The Washington Post And The
New York Times,
And On 25 September 2001 In The International Herald Tribune |
| 'We Have A Solution' - Click
Here |
From 1999: 'Your City Could Be Next'
To 2001: 'If The World War Starts From This, What Else Could
Be The Interpretation?'
Don't Say You Weren't Warned
An Ethos Of
Unremitting Violence And Darkness |
"About ten days after 9/11, I went
through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went
downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for
me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, 'Sir, you’ve got to come in and
talk to me a second.' I said, 'Well, you’re too busy.' He said, 'No, no.' He says, 'We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.' This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, 'We’re going to
war with Iraq? Why?' He said, 'I don’t know.' ...So I came back to see him a few
weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, 'Are we still going
to war with Iraq?' And he said, 'Oh, it’s worse than that.' He reached over on his
desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, 'I just got this down from
upstairs'—meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office—'today.' And he said,
'This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five
years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon,
Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.' I
said, 'Is it classified?' He said, 'Yes, sir.' I said, 'Well, don’t show it to me.'
And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, 'You remember that?' He said, 'Sir, I
didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!'."
General Wesley Clarke, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe
1997 - 2000
interviewed by Amy Goodman
Democracy
Now, 2 March 2007
"The Marine Corps on Thursday once
again did damage control after a photograph surfaced of a sniper team in Afghanistan [in September 2010] posing in
front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the notorious Nazi
SS — a special unit that murdered millions of
Jews, gypsies and others..... In the photo taken in the Afghanistan town of Sangin, the
Marine Corps unit is posing with guns in front of an American flag and a large, dark blue
flag with what appear to be the letters 'SS' in the shape of white jagged lightning
bolts.... The SS, or Schutzstaffel, was the police
and military force of the Nazi Party, which was distinct from the general army. Members pledged an oath of
loyalty to Adolph Hitler. SS
units were held responsible for many war crimes and played an integral role in the
extermination of millions of Jews along with gypsies and other people who were deemed
undesirable. The SS was declared
to be a criminal organization at the Nuremberg war crime trials. Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered
in Los Angeles, said he does not buy the explanation that posing with the flag was an
innocent mistake and insisted the American public has a right to know what happened. 'If
you look at any book on the Nazi period, this is the dreaded symbol of the SS, and to have a Marine Corps unit adopt it and put it beside the American
flag when 200,000 Americans died to free the world of that dreaded symbol is just beyond
the pale,' he said."
US Marines posed with Nazi symbol in Afghanistan
Associated
Press, 10 February 2012
"Ron Paul has warned the U.S. is
'slipping into a fascist system' dominated by government and businesses. The Republican
presidential candidate made the bold claim as he held a rally on Saturday - upstaging
other nearby Republican Party banquets..... Paul staged his rally near the nation's World War I museum,
asserting that the U.S. got off track about 100 years ago during the era of President
Woodrow Wilson.... 'We've slipped away from a true Republic,' Paul said. 'Now we're
slipping into a fascist system where it's a combination of government and big business and authoritarian rule and the
suppression of the individual rights of each and every American citizen....Several
Republicans slipped away from the banquets to join the Paul rally. Among them was Ralph
Munyan, a Republican committeeman in Kansas City's home county, who said he agreed with
Paul's warnings of a 'fascist system' and his pledge to the end nation's
involvement in wars overseas and against drugs. 'His foreign policy is one of peace,' Munyan said."
Ron Paul says U.S. is turning into a 'fascist system' dominated by government and
businesses
Associated
Press, 19 February 2012 |
'The Only Way To Save The World Is To Begin With
Ourselves'
Britain's Chief Rabbi Speaks Out To The 'Deaf' |
"Two things have haunted me
since 9/11. The first is the pain, the grief, the lives lost and families devastated, the
sheer barbaric ingenuity of evil. The scar in our humanity is still unhealed. The second is our failure to understand what Osama bin
Laden was saying about the West. We did not hear the message then. I’m not sure we
hear it now.... That is what I heard in the
echoes of 9/11: that all great civilisations eventually decline, and when they begin to do
so they are vulnerable. That is what Osama bin Laden believed about the West and so did
some of the West’s own greatest minds. If
so, then 9/11 belongs to a wider series of phenomena affecting the West: the
disintegration of the family, the demise of authority, the build-up of personal debt, the
collapse of financial institutions, the downgrading of the American economy, the
continuing failure of some European economies, the loss of a sense of honour, loyalty and
integrity that has brought once esteemed groups into disrepute, the waning throughout the
West of a sense of national identity; even last month’s riots. These are all signs of
the arteriosclerosis of a culture, a civilisation grown old. Whenever Me takes precedence over We, and pleasure today over
viability tomorrow, a society is in trouble. If so, then the enemy is not radical Islam,
it is us and our by now unsustainable self-indulgence.... The only way to save the world is to begin with ourselves."
Bin Laden saw that the West was in decline
Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth
London Times, 8 September 2011, Print Edition, P31 |
We Need New Thinking Urgently
"Once again, the world
needs new thinking, based not just on the recognition of universal interests and of global
interdependence but also on a certain moral
foundation.... politics becomes dirty and a
zero-sum, lose-lose game only when it has no moral
core. This, perhaps, is the main lesson to be learned from the past two decades."
Mikhail Gorbachev
Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union?
The
Nation, 21 December 2011
'We Need A New Way Of Thinking'
Consciousness-Based Education And World Peace
Click Here |