Lần này, nhân có sự việc "thiêu sống nạn nhân", vụ thiêu sống được quay phim từ nhiều góc cạnh theo đúng bài bản chuyên nghiệp của Hollywood nhằm tạo tối đa tác dụng và tác động (maximum emotional effects & emotional affects) để làm TÊ LIỆT khả năng LÝ GIẢI của độc giả. Chúng tôi, cũng đành phải ứng dụng một phương pháp thông tin "đặc biệt nhân chủ": BUỘC ĐỘC GIẢ PHẢI TỰ THUYẾT PHỤC.
Chúng tôi chỉ xin nhắc nhở rằng, khi quí vị KINH TỞM HÀNH ĐỘNG "THIÊU SỐNG" NÀY và tự động "ghê tởm Hồi giáo" tức là quí vị đã hoàn toàn sa bẫy. Và mục tiêu tạo tối đa tác động cảm tính đồng thời triệt tiêu khả năng lý giải của nó đã đạt hiệu quả.
Đó CHÍNH là lý do tại sao CẢ HAI BÊN "ĐỐI THỦ" đám "thánh tụ, thánh quốc" ISIL cũng như báo chí chính qui Âu Mỹ ĐỀU CỐ TÌNH TRÌNH CHIẾU RẤT CHI TIẾT và LẬP ĐI LẬP LẠI những "tội ác cực kỳ ghê tởm "của thánh quốc hồi (ISIL) DAESH như phim "thiêu sống"!
Trong khi đó, tất cả tội ác và tội phạm của lính Âu Mỹ và Do Thái ghê rợn hơn, nhiều hơn, và rộng lớn hơn... nhưng chỉ được nhắc đến khi BỊ PHANH PHUI RÕ RÀNG, và chỉ được nhắc như một bản tin ĐỌC, không hề được trưng bày trình chiếu HÌNH ẢHN, PHIM, DIỄN TIẾN CHI TIẾT một cách nhấn mạnh lập đi lập lại như những "bản tin về tội ác thánh quốc Hồi".
Dư luận Âu Mỹ cũng như cảm tính của chính quí vị sẽ như thế nào khi tội ác và tội phạm của binh lính Âu Mỹ với những nạn nhân trẻ em người Ảrập bị banh xác, cháy nám v.v trong khi đang ngủ, đang chơi được trình chiếu tên các đài truyền thông chính qui CNN, FOX, MSNBC, ABC, BBC?
Quí vị cần nhớ rõ phản ứng của người Âu Mỹ đã như thế nào khi HÌNH ẢNH tên tướng LOAN bắn vào đầu một nghi can VC giữa phố Sài Gòn; hình ảnh cố bé gái (Phúc) bị cháy nám từ bom Napalm cũng như HÌNH ẢNH cuộc THẢM SÁT MỸ LAI được trình chiếu.
Phương pháp thông tin "đặc biệt nhân chủ" lần này là: BUỘC ĐỘC GIẢ PHẢI TỰ TÌM HIỂU, TRAO ĐỔI VỚI NHAU và tự THUYẾT PHỤC, nghĩa là chúng tôi không DỊCH, không PHÂN TÍCH, không LẬP LUẬN, mà chỉ trình bày những chứng cớ nguyên bản Anh ngữ để những ai THẬT TÂM CÓ NHẬN THỨC tất nhiên sẽ tìm đủ cách để tìm hiểu.
Đã đến lúc độc giả Việt Nam phải trưởng thành và tự trách nhiệm thông tin. Một cơ thể dựa dẫm quá nhiều vào trụ sinh kháng sinh, cơ thể đó không còn khả năng tự đề kháng nữa.
Thứ nhất, ngay cả độc giả không có khả năng Anh ngữ, thì điều tối thiểu nếu như họ thật sự có nhận thức, muốn tìm hiểu thì ngay "bản dịch Google," dù tệ hại, cũng gợi ý, và chính sự tệ hại và bất toàn của " bản dịch Google" sẽ là động lực thúc đẩy một số quị độc giả trau dồi Anh ngữ cho chính họ.
Thứ hai, nếu họ thật sự nhận thức và có óc tự chủ phán đoán, thì ngay HÌNH ẢNH, và PHIM cũng đã đủ thôi thúc chất vấn một cách nền tảng với những câu hỏi TẠI SAO? (tại sao hình ảnh như thế này? Tại sao nhân vật làm như thế kia? v.v) ; và đây cũng là ĐỘNG LỰC khiến những người có nhận thức sẽ buộc phải tìm đến nhau trao đổi hội thảo, hơn là dựa vào "sự sẵn có" một bài phân tích lý giải chi tiết.
Thứ ba, khi đã là những tín đồ "quốc gia" trung thành của nhà nước báo chí chính qui, tất cả bằng chứng lập luận vững chắc v.v thì căn bệnh "ám tín tự thị" của họ khiến những chứng cớ hiển nhiên chẳng có tác dụng gì.
Riêng Nhân Chủ, chúng tôi khẳng định với những chứng cớ trình bày từ trước đến nay, rằng Thánh Quốc DAESH và thánh tụ của nó là cả một kế hoạch sản phẩm của tập đoàn quyền lực Âu Mỹ Do Thái, và TẤT CẢ những vụ gọi là "khủng bố" từ vụ 911 cho đến các vụ nhỏ khác đến nay như sự vụ Charlie Hebdo v.v đều là những màn giả địch của chính các cơ quan đặc nhiệm của Âu Mỹ Do Thái tạo ra môt cách chuyên nghiệp với đầy đủ kỹ thuật... nhưng cũng hớ hênh dễ biết nếu có nhận thức độc lập và biết tận dụng tính chất vấn lý giải thông thường. Hay nói rõ ràng khẳng định hơn là TẤT CẢ NHỮNG CÁI GỌI LÀ "KHỦNG BỐ" từ 911 đến nay KHÔNG PHẢI là do Hồi Giáo hay vì là Hồi Giáo, dù bản thân Hồi giáo, cũng như các tôn giáo khác, không "hiền hòa tử tế". Họ không có đủ điều kiện và kỹ năng phạm những tội ác này, những "tội ác" hoàn toàn không có lợi cho họ, mà chỉ có lợi cho "đối thủ" Tây Âu và Do Thái của họ!
Xin mời quí độc giả, nếu chưa đọc, xin quay ngược đọc lại những bài phân tích vừa qua của chúng tôi về DAESH (ISIL) về sự vụ Charlie Hebdo, và tham cứu những thông tin dưới đây, đặc biệt ĐOẠN PHIM PHÂN TÍCH vụ dàn cảnh THIÊU SỐNG "PHI CÔNH JORDANIAN" .
Và xin ghi nhớ rằng với kỹ thuật điện toán hóa PHIM ẢNH, PHOTOSHOP, và tạo hình hôm nay, người bình thường không có khả năng phân biệt nổi hư thực. Nhưng cũng chính kỹ thuật điện toán này lại cho phép một người với khả năng sử dụng trung bình các ứng liệu âm thanh phim ảnh cũng đủ để tháo gỡ những màn "ảo thuật" này.
"Thiêu Sống giữa Hí Trường"
Hướng Dẫn Cách Làm Một Cảnh phim Thiêu Sống!
Chúng tôi rất mong nhận được những lý giải nhận định của quí độc giả về sự kiện "kinh tởm" này qua những thông tin chúng tôi trưng bày ở đây với NHỮNG CÂU HỎI "TẠI SAO" THẬT CĂN BẢN và CẦN THIẾT.
Và xin đề nghị quí độc giả TẢI HẲN ĐOẠN PHIM này về MÁY để xem chậm và SUY NGẪM LÝ GIẢI.
10-02-2015
NKPTC
1-DO THÁI là kẻ DUY NHẤT ĐOẠT LỢI LỚN LAO trong TOÀN BỘ TIẾN TRÌNH ISIL và "KHỦNG HOẢNG" UKRAINE
Ghi chú: Hai phim dưới chỉ là cùng một bản. Một bản từ LiveLeak và một bản từ trang nhânchu. Sở dĩ chúng tôi đăng tải cả hai vì phòng hờ bản chính trên mạng bị tháo gỡ, hoặc bị chặn từ một số cổng và IP.
Thủ thuật phim ảnh tạo xúc động cảm tính- mạnh hư cấu THIÊU SỐNG ..Nhưng rất hớ hênh phi khoa học phi thực tiễn.
Đài phát thanh "Tiếng Nói Do Thái" bàn luận về vụ "Thiêu Sống"
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=df2_1423081561
http://www.france24.com/en/20140917-france-switches-arabic-daesh-acronym-islamic-state/
1- US Begins to Use 'Daesh' for ISIL, 'Islamic State'
2-France says the name 'ISIS' is offensive, will call it 'Daesh
1-
CIA unit's wacky idea: Depict Saddam as gay
By Jeff Stein
During planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA's Iraq Operations Group kicked around a number of ideas for discrediting Saddam Hussein in the eyes of his people.
One was to create a video purporting to show the Iraqi dictator having sex with a teenage boy, according to two former CIA officials familiar with the project.
“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” said one of the former officials. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”
The idea was to then “flood Iraq with the videos,” the former official said.
Another idea was to interrupt Iraqi television programming with a fake special news bulletin. An actor playing Hussein would announce that he was stepping down in favor of his (much-reviled) son Uday.
“I’m sure you will throw your support behind His Excellency Uday,” the fake Hussein would intone.
The spy agency’s Office of Technical Services collaborated on the ideas, which also included inserting fake “crawls” -- messages at the bottom of the screen -- into Iraqi newscasts.
The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.
Eventually, “things ground to a halt,” the other former officer said, because no one could come to agreement on the projects.
They also faced strong opposition from James Pavitt, then head of the agency’s Operations Division, and his deputy, Hugh Turner, who “kept throwing darts at it.”
The ideas were patently ridiculous, said the other former agency officer.
“They came from people whose careers were spent in Latin America or East Asia” and didn’t understand the cultural nuances of the region.
“Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East -- nobody cares,” agreed a third former CIA official with extensive experience in the region. “Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos.”
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to confirm the accounts, or deny them.
"While I can't confirm these accounts, if these ideas were ever floated by anyone at any time, they clearly didn't go anywhere," the official said.
The reality, the former officials said, was that the agency really didn’t have enough money and expertise to carry out the projects.
“The military took them over,” said one. “They had assets in psy-war down at Ft. Bragg,” at the army’s special warfare center.
“The agency got rid of most of its non-paramilitary covert action in the 1980s, after Bill Casey died,” said the third former official. “He was a big fan of covert action, but neither Bob Gates, who succeeded him as acting [CIA] director, or any after him, wanted anything to do with it.”
“There was a flurry of activity during the first Gulf War,” the official added, “but [Gen. Norman] Schwarzkopf made it clear he had to approve everything, and he basically approved nothing, except, reluctantly at first, surrender leaflets. By the late '90s there were very few people left who knew anything about covert action or how to do it. “
The leaflets also had “unintended consequences,” the former official added.
“In the perverted logic of Iraq, the Iraqi soldiers decided they had to have a leaflet to surrender, so they fought us to get one."
According to histories of the 2003 invasion, the single most effective “information warfare” project, which originated in the Pentagon, was to send faxes and e-mails to Iraqi unit commanders as the fighting began, telling them their situation was hopeless, to round up their tanks, artillery and men, and go home.
Many did.
Hear a further discussion of the videos on PRI's The World.
By Jeff Stein | May 25, 2010; 6:00 AM ET One was to create a video purporting to show the Iraqi dictator having sex with a teenage boy, according to two former CIA officials familiar with the project.
“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” said one of the former officials. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”
The idea was to then “flood Iraq with the videos,” the former official said.
Another idea was to interrupt Iraqi television programming with a fake special news bulletin. An actor playing Hussein would announce that he was stepping down in favor of his (much-reviled) son Uday.
“I’m sure you will throw your support behind His Excellency Uday,” the fake Hussein would intone.
The spy agency’s Office of Technical Services collaborated on the ideas, which also included inserting fake “crawls” -- messages at the bottom of the screen -- into Iraqi newscasts.
The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.
Eventually, “things ground to a halt,” the other former officer said, because no one could come to agreement on the projects.
They also faced strong opposition from James Pavitt, then head of the agency’s Operations Division, and his deputy, Hugh Turner, who “kept throwing darts at it.”
The ideas were patently ridiculous, said the other former agency officer.
“They came from people whose careers were spent in Latin America or East Asia” and didn’t understand the cultural nuances of the region.
“Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East -- nobody cares,” agreed a third former CIA official with extensive experience in the region. “Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos.”
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to confirm the accounts, or deny them.
"While I can't confirm these accounts, if these ideas were ever floated by anyone at any time, they clearly didn't go anywhere," the official said.
The reality, the former officials said, was that the agency really didn’t have enough money and expertise to carry out the projects.
“The military took them over,” said one. “They had assets in psy-war down at Ft. Bragg,” at the army’s special warfare center.
“The agency got rid of most of its non-paramilitary covert action in the 1980s, after Bill Casey died,” said the third former official. “He was a big fan of covert action, but neither Bob Gates, who succeeded him as acting [CIA] director, or any after him, wanted anything to do with it.”
“There was a flurry of activity during the first Gulf War,” the official added, “but [Gen. Norman] Schwarzkopf made it clear he had to approve everything, and he basically approved nothing, except, reluctantly at first, surrender leaflets. By the late '90s there were very few people left who knew anything about covert action or how to do it. “
The leaflets also had “unintended consequences,” the former official added.
“In the perverted logic of Iraq, the Iraqi soldiers decided they had to have a leaflet to surrender, so they fought us to get one."
According to histories of the 2003 invasion, the single most effective “information warfare” project, which originated in the Pentagon, was to send faxes and e-mails to Iraqi unit commanders as the fighting began, telling them their situation was hopeless, to round up their tanks, artillery and men, and go home.
Many did.
Hear a further discussion of the videos on PRI's The World.
Categories: Intelligence, Military | Tags: Hugh Turner, James Pavitt, Robert Gates, Saddam Hussein, The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan, William Casey
2-
The CIA Is Training Syria's Rebels: Uh-Oh, Says a Top Iraqi Leader
A soldier waves the independence flag in a Damascus suburb in January. (Reuters/Ahmed Jadallah.)
The United States is slipping and sliding down that proverbial “slippery slope” in Syria toward something that looks increasingly like war.
Most worryingly, according to The New York Times, the CIA is training Syrian fighters in Jordan. Buried in its story today about Secretary of State John Kerry’s announcement that the United States will increase aid to the rebels, including medical supplies and those always tasty MREs (“Meals Ready to Eat”), was this previously unreported nugget:
A covert program to train rebel fighters, which State Department officials here were not prepared to discuss, has also been under way. According to an official in Washington, who asked not to be identified, the CIA since last year has been training groups of Syrian rebels in Jordan.Now, let us not be shocked, shocked that the CIA is doing this; in fact, it’s very likely that this is the tip of a very large iceberg. Undoubtedly, the CIA, and the Pentagon, is coordinating a regional effort involving the Sunni bloc involving Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey and Qatar to topple the Assad government in Damascus. That, folks, is called “regime change.” And we’ve seen it before.
The official did not provide details about the training or what difference it may have made on the battlefield, but said the CIA had not given weapons or ammunition to the rebels. An agency spokesman declined to comment.
The additional $60 million in US aid to Syria’s rebels is headed to the coffers of the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC) and to the Syrian Military Council (SMC), a newly created body that purports to represent the so-called Syrian Free Army. Interestingly enough, although Egypt has pretty much stayed out of the fray in Syria officially, the SOC and the SMC are based in Cairo, Egypt, whose Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni secret society, is backing the Muslim Brotherhood–led rebels in Syria. At a background briefing yesterday, a State Department official said this:
The United States will be sending technical advisors through our implementing partners to support the SOC’s staff at their Cairo headquarters in the execution of this assistance. This will ensure that the assistance continues to comply with U.S. rules and regulations on the use of foreign assistance, including vetting, oversight, and monitoring. To remind that this additional $60 million for the SOC is in addition to the more than $50 million in nonlethal support we have already provided to help Syrian activists organize opposition efforts across the country and to amplify their message to Syrians and to the world through communications and broadcasting equipment.There’s a long analysis of the Syrian Free Army and the SMC published by the Institute for the Study of War, a neoconservative think tank in Washington. Here’s an excerpt:
The Supreme Military Council was created on the heels of a three day conference held in Antalya, Turkey, from December 5-7, 2012. During this conference, rebel leaders from across Syria announced the election of a new 30-member unified command structure called the Supreme Military Command (SMC). The SMC is led by Chief of Staff Major General Salim Idriss and includes 11 former officers and 19 civilian leaders.That all sounds organized enough, but on the ground, inside Syria, the lines of authority and the lines of command are less than clear, and many of the anti-Assad fighters are radical and extreme Islamists and Al Qaeda types. Although the United States would like to “vet” the recipients of its aid, and although the people that the CIA is training in Jordan are probably from the more-moderate rather than less-moderate part of the anti-Assad spectrum, there’s just no telling what Syria after the fall of Assad might look like.
The SMC differs from previous efforts to unify the military opposition because more groups and support networks are included. It could prove to be a more sustainable organization than its predecessors. The SMC includes all of Syria’s most important field commanders, and its authority is based on the power and influence of these rebel leaders including: Abdel Qadir Salah, head of the Tawhid Brigade in Aleppo; Mustafa Abdel Karim, head of the Dara al-Thawra Brigade; Ahmed Issa, head of Suqour al-Sham Brigade in Idlib; Jamal Marouf, head of the Syrian Martyrs Brigade in Idlib; Osama al-Jinidi, head of the Farouq Battalions; and General Ziad al-Fahd, head of the Damascus Military Council.
The SMC was organized to incorporate the supply chains and networks that already existed inside Syria and eventually channel them through the centralized units of the SMC. In order to achieve this goal, the command is divided into five geographic fronts with six elected members each: the Eastern front, the Western/Middle front, the Northern front, the Southern front, and the Homs front.
One person who’s worried about exactly that is Faleh al-Fayyah, the national security adviser of Iraq, who spoke yesterday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. In his talk, he was asked about recent comments from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who worried about Syria spinning out of control. Iraq, of course, ruled by a Shiite coalition, is petrified at the idea that a bunch of Sunni radicals and Muslim Brotherhood types might take over in Damascus, leading to civil war, partition and a spillover into Iraq. As Fayyah said:
I believe that the statement by his excellency, Prime Minister al-Maliki, yesterday was an analysis for the potential and possible repercussions that would happen given the developments in Syria. And if it’s a bad, negative end to the – to the issue in Syria, then you will see the partition of the country, you would see a civil – a civil war, you would see a potentially a – (inaudible) – and also you would see – and also if the extremist factions come into power in a new regime, in a new order in Syria, then this will export an array of problems to Iraq.He went on:
We have also started to see that some of these problems started being shipped to Lebanon, exported to Lebanon, and the ripple effect is now being seen in Lebanon. The prime minister’s analysis is an accurate and correct one. And if the situation keeps going in that direction that it is taking today, we feel there might be a civil war, there might be a sectarian partition of the – of the country and also we feel that terrorist groups may try to get the upper hand in that environment. Therefore, we feel if the situation goes into that direction, the future of the Middle East will witness tension, will witness further problems, and in that effect, the analysis of his excellency the prime minister, Prime Minister Maliki, was accurate and correct.So what are we looking at? The very regime that the United States installed in Baghdad, now closely aligned with Iran, is fearful that the regime we are now trying to install in Damascus might be a bitter enemy—which, naturally, will drive Baghdad into the waiting arms of Tehran.
Given the rhetoric in Washington, Barack Obama won't be able to resist the drumbeat of war in Syria for long, Robert Dreyfuss predicts.
3-
'Underwear bomber' was working for the CIA
Bomber involved in plot to attack US-bound jet was working as an informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged
A would-be "underwear bomber" involved in a plot to attack a US-based jet was in fact working as an undercover informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged.
The revelation is the latest twist in an increasingly bizarre story about the disruption of an apparent attempt by al-Qaida to strike at a high-profile American target using a sophisticated device hidden in the clothing of an attacker.
The plot, which the White House said on Monday had involved the seizing of an underwear bomb by authorities in the Middle East sometime in the last 10 days, had caused alarm throughout the US.
It has also been linked to a suspected US drone strike in Yemen where two Yemeni members of al-Qaida were killed by a missile attack on their car on Sunday, one of them a senior militant, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso.
But the news that the individual at the heart of the bomb plot was in fact an informer for US intelligence is likely to raise just as many questions as it answers.
Citing US and Yemeni officials, Associated Press reported that the unnamed informant was working under cover for the Saudis and the CIA when he was given the bomb, which was of a new non-metallic type aimed at getting past airport security.
The informant then turned the device over to his handlers and has left Yemen, the officials told the news agency. The LA Times, which first broke the news that the plot had been a "sting operation", said that the bomb plan had also provided the intelligence leads that allowed the strike on Quso.
Earlier John Brennan, Barack Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser and a former CIA official, told ABC's Good Morning America that authorities are "confident that neither the device nor the intended user of this device pose a threat to us".
US officials have said the plot was detected in its early stages and that no American airliner was ever at risk.
The FBI is conducting forensic tests on the bomb as a first step towards discovering whether it would have cleared existing airport scanning systems. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic senator for California who heads the Senate intelligence committee, gave an early hint when she said that she had been briefed about the device which she called "undetectable".
But AP quoted an unnamed US official as saying current detection methods probably would have spotted the shape of the explosive in the latest device.
Just how major an escalation in threat is posed by the bomb remains unclear. Security sources have told news agencies that it was a step up in levels of sophistication from the original underwear bomb that was used in a failed attempt to blow up an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009.
The device used a more refined detonation system, and Brennan said "it was a threat from a standpoint of the design".
When it comes to who made the device the focus is on an al-Qaida's offshoot, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Matthew Levitt, a counter-terrorism expert at the Washington Institute, said that the interception of the plot amounted to a significant achievement for US security agencies.
He said: "The FBI is holding the device, which suggests that this was done by having boots on the ground. This was a sophisticated operation that shows we are making in-roads in serious places."
Levitt, who was involved as a senior analyst in the FBI's investigation into 9/11, said that it was natural to be sceptical in a presidential election year about security announcements. "But this was not political, it didn't come from the White House and my sense was that it was a really unique success," he said.
Levitt said that the spotlight would now be even more intense on Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, AQAP's assumed bomb-making chief, who is thought to be hiding out in Yemen.
Asiri is believed to have been the creator of the Detroit underwear bomb as well as explosives that were packed into printer cartridges bound for Chicago in 2010.
The revelation is the latest twist in an increasingly bizarre story about the disruption of an apparent attempt by al-Qaida to strike at a high-profile American target using a sophisticated device hidden in the clothing of an attacker.
The plot, which the White House said on Monday had involved the seizing of an underwear bomb by authorities in the Middle East sometime in the last 10 days, had caused alarm throughout the US.
It has also been linked to a suspected US drone strike in Yemen where two Yemeni members of al-Qaida were killed by a missile attack on their car on Sunday, one of them a senior militant, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso.
But the news that the individual at the heart of the bomb plot was in fact an informer for US intelligence is likely to raise just as many questions as it answers.
Citing US and Yemeni officials, Associated Press reported that the unnamed informant was working under cover for the Saudis and the CIA when he was given the bomb, which was of a new non-metallic type aimed at getting past airport security.
The informant then turned the device over to his handlers and has left Yemen, the officials told the news agency. The LA Times, which first broke the news that the plot had been a "sting operation", said that the bomb plan had also provided the intelligence leads that allowed the strike on Quso.
Earlier John Brennan, Barack Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser and a former CIA official, told ABC's Good Morning America that authorities are "confident that neither the device nor the intended user of this device pose a threat to us".
US officials have said the plot was detected in its early stages and that no American airliner was ever at risk.
The FBI is conducting forensic tests on the bomb as a first step towards discovering whether it would have cleared existing airport scanning systems. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic senator for California who heads the Senate intelligence committee, gave an early hint when she said that she had been briefed about the device which she called "undetectable".
But AP quoted an unnamed US official as saying current detection methods probably would have spotted the shape of the explosive in the latest device.
Just how major an escalation in threat is posed by the bomb remains unclear. Security sources have told news agencies that it was a step up in levels of sophistication from the original underwear bomb that was used in a failed attempt to blow up an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009.
The device used a more refined detonation system, and Brennan said "it was a threat from a standpoint of the design".
When it comes to who made the device the focus is on an al-Qaida's offshoot, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Matthew Levitt, a counter-terrorism expert at the Washington Institute, said that the interception of the plot amounted to a significant achievement for US security agencies.
He said: "The FBI is holding the device, which suggests that this was done by having boots on the ground. This was a sophisticated operation that shows we are making in-roads in serious places."
Levitt, who was involved as a senior analyst in the FBI's investigation into 9/11, said that it was natural to be sceptical in a presidential election year about security announcements. "But this was not political, it didn't come from the White House and my sense was that it was a really unique success," he said.
Levitt said that the spotlight would now be even more intense on Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, AQAP's assumed bomb-making chief, who is thought to be hiding out in Yemen.
Asiri is believed to have been the creator of the Detroit underwear bomb as well as explosives that were packed into printer cartridges bound for Chicago in 2010.
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Would-be underwear bomber a double agent
CBS News senior correspondent John Miller is a former assistant director at the FBI and former head of the Counterterrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau and the Major Crimes Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. (CBS News) The would-be bomber in the recently-uncovered plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner leaving Yemen was an undercover intelligence agent. The plot was revealed to U.S. intelligence officials based on a tip by Saudi intelligence services, and had been revealed by a Saudi intelligence source who had been inside Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and providing information to the Saudis and the CIA for some time.
The double-agent revelation goes right to the heart of an intelligence agency's nightmare, which is identifying a source that they've placed inside an organization.
Intelligence agencies and senior officials tell CBS News they're not going anywhere near commenting on the issue for obvious reasons.
The Associated Press is reporting that the alleged double agent has been removed from Yemen and apparently is safe. This may go a long way toward explaining why authorities said yesterday that the bomber was no longer considered a threat.
It may well be that he was actually working with the CIA all along.
FBI scrutinizes al Qaeda's latest bomb
CIA thwarts new al Qaeda underwear bomb plot
Bomb plot revealed day after alleged planner killed Since 2009, U.S. intelligence officials have had a laser focus on AQAP - al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - the group most believe is responsible for the latest bomb plot.
It's a highly capable group made up of experienced leaders, battle tested terrorists and a very talented bomb maker.
This latest plot serves as a stark reminder of their primary mission: bring down an American plane.
A former FBI agent who has questioned more members of AQAP tells CBS News that what makes AQAP - of all the al Qaeda affiliates - the chosen one to attack America is that they are the closest to Osama bin Laden's version al Qaeda. That's why they feel it is their duty, their obligation to continue the bin Laden fight, regardless of what other al Qaeda groups do in different areas.
Ibrihim al-Asiri is AQAP's master bomb maker. When the group's leaders plotted to kill Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism chief at his home in Jeddah in 2009, Asiri made the bomb and personally chose the suicide bomber: his own brother.
That gives some idea about the dedication and the level of hatred that the group has. The Saudi counterterrorism chief survived; Asiri's brother did not.
But Asiri continued to make bombs that were cleverly disguised; the underwear bomb that failed to detonate on board a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas, 2009, and two bombs hidden in printers that were shipped as cargo through U.P.S. and Fed-Ex. The printer bombs were intercepted by intelligence agents just hours before they were set to blow up the planes that carried them.
Bomb technician Kevin Barry says he sees in Asiri's work increasing in "sophistication at trying to prevent being detected."
"They're making mistakes," adds Barry. "They're not big mistakes. But we've been fortunate that they've been caught."
Barry says Asiri's bombs reveal a bit about the man.
"It tells you that he has the assets, he has the intent, and he has no conscience," Barry says.
Now the FBI has Asiri's most recent bomb at their lab in Quantico, Virginia. What they're doing now is working on reverse engineering it.
They're going to actually make and blow up a copy of the bomb. They're going to learn how it worked, how it would function, and what effect it would have on an aircraft in flight.
The double-agent revelation goes right to the heart of an intelligence agency's nightmare, which is identifying a source that they've placed inside an organization.
Intelligence agencies and senior officials tell CBS News they're not going anywhere near commenting on the issue for obvious reasons.
The Associated Press is reporting that the alleged double agent has been removed from Yemen and apparently is safe. This may go a long way toward explaining why authorities said yesterday that the bomber was no longer considered a threat.
It may well be that he was actually working with the CIA all along.
FBI scrutinizes al Qaeda's latest bomb
CIA thwarts new al Qaeda underwear bomb plot
Bomb plot revealed day after alleged planner killed Since 2009, U.S. intelligence officials have had a laser focus on AQAP - al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - the group most believe is responsible for the latest bomb plot.
It's a highly capable group made up of experienced leaders, battle tested terrorists and a very talented bomb maker.
This latest plot serves as a stark reminder of their primary mission: bring down an American plane.
A former FBI agent who has questioned more members of AQAP tells CBS News that what makes AQAP - of all the al Qaeda affiliates - the chosen one to attack America is that they are the closest to Osama bin Laden's version al Qaeda. That's why they feel it is their duty, their obligation to continue the bin Laden fight, regardless of what other al Qaeda groups do in different areas.
Ibrihim al-Asiri is AQAP's master bomb maker. When the group's leaders plotted to kill Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism chief at his home in Jeddah in 2009, Asiri made the bomb and personally chose the suicide bomber: his own brother.
That gives some idea about the dedication and the level of hatred that the group has. The Saudi counterterrorism chief survived; Asiri's brother did not.
But Asiri continued to make bombs that were cleverly disguised; the underwear bomb that failed to detonate on board a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas, 2009, and two bombs hidden in printers that were shipped as cargo through U.P.S. and Fed-Ex. The printer bombs were intercepted by intelligence agents just hours before they were set to blow up the planes that carried them.
Bomb technician Kevin Barry says he sees in Asiri's work increasing in "sophistication at trying to prevent being detected."
"They're making mistakes," adds Barry. "They're not big mistakes. But we've been fortunate that they've been caught."
Barry says Asiri's bombs reveal a bit about the man.
"It tells you that he has the assets, he has the intent, and he has no conscience," Barry says.
Now the FBI has Asiri's most recent bomb at their lab in Quantico, Virginia. What they're doing now is working on reverse engineering it.
They're going to actually make and blow up a copy of the bomb. They're going to learn how it worked, how it would function, and what effect it would have on an aircraft in flight.
© 2012 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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09.12.14
Syrian Rebels: We’ll Use U.S. Weapons to Fight Assad, Whether Obama Likes It or Not
If the U.S. arms the Free Syrian Army to fight ISIS, they are going to battle the Syrian regime at the same time—no matter what the White House says.
For the Free Syrian Army, the loose conglomeration of opposition fighters that are not extremists and not aligned with the Assad regime, the war against ISIS began long before President Obama’s prime time speech Wednesday night. They have been battling ISIS for a year and fighting the Assad regime for over three years. For all that time, they have been begging the United States to send them weapons, but the CIA program to arm them has been extremely limited. They are getting beaten on both fronts, badly.
“Because of our failure [the rebels] have been so badly harmed and so many killed,” said Sen. John McCain, a longtime advocate for intervening in the Syrian conflict. “The blood is on their hands, the responsibility for the casualties that they have suffered unnecessarily, the responsibility lies with the president.”
In the administration’s haste to now throw military support behind the rebels, they are now committing to fighting alongside a force that is fighting Assad, possibly drawing the U.S. directly into the Syrian civil war.
After two years of rejecting calls from his own national security team to arm the FSA, President Obama announced Wednesday night that he now wanted to arm the FSA to fight against the terrorists who are on the march in Syria and Iraq. He said the only way to beat ISIS was to train and equip the moderate rebels—the same rebels he ignored for so long—and he called on Congress to authorize the mission.
“In the fight against ISIL, we cannot rely on an Assad regime that terrorizes its people; a regime that will never regain the legitimacy it has lost,” Obama said, using an alternate acronym for ISIS. “Instead, we must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like ISIL, while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria's crisis once and for all.”
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday that Obama wanted to wage war only against ISIS, not the regime in Damascus. After all, Syria is still technically a sovereign U.N. member state and the U.S. thinks the regime will be needed to negotiate the political solution to the civil war Obama mentioned.
“What the president is focused on right now, and the authorization that he feels he has under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, is to take the steps that are necessary to prevent ISIL from establishing a safe haven in Syria, and succeed in degrading and ultimately destroying ISIL,” he said.
But the Syrian opposition and the Free Syrian Army aren’t waiting for legal authorization to fight the Damascus regime; they are getting bombarded by Assad’s Syrian Arab Army every day, as it continues to commit mass murder of Syrian civilians through the siege of major cities, the dropping of barrel bombs, and the continued use of chlorine gas to kill innocents, according to international monitors.
“The fight against ISIS is one part of a multi-front war in Syria. The brutal rule and poor governance of the Assad regime generated the conditions for ISIS become the global threat that it is today,” Syrian National Coalition President Hadi AlBahra told The Daily Beast on Thursday.
He added, “Airstrikes on ISIS strongholds in Syria are a much-needed element to degrade the extremist group’s capabilities. To be effective, strikes must be accompanied by well-equipped and trained military forces on the ground. We therefore welcome the commitment to intensify the train-and-equip program to enable the Free Syrian Army to eradicate ISIS and other forms of terror in Syria, including the Assad regime.”
There is a contingent of senior officials both inside the White House and inside the intelligence community that believe the Assad regime must be preserved in order to prevent Syria and the region from falling into greater chaos.“The blood is on their hands, the responsibility for the casualties that they have suffered unnecessarily, the responsibility lies with the president.”
Oubai Shahbandar, senior advisor to the Syrian Opposition Coalition, told The Daily Beast that it’s unrealistic to ask the moderate rebels to use U.S. weapons against ISIS but not against Assad. In major battles like in Aleppo, ISIS and Assad are working together. So you can’t fight one without fighting the other, Shahbandar added. (It’s a point of view backed by many senior State Department and Pentagon officials, who agree with the FSA that Assad is the magnet for the terrorists and that Assad's continued rule only perpetuates the ISIS problem.)
Although they sometimes clash, the Assad regime has mostly avoided fighting ISIS, letting them battle the other opposition groups unfettered. ISIS also sells oil from its vast oil fields in northern and eastern Syria directly to the Assad regime for cash. These transactions have continued, even as ISIS has begun to attack government sites, like the Taqba air base.
“ISIS and Assad are two sides of the same coin. We are going to defend the Syrian people both from the atrocities of the Assad regime and from the atrocities of ISIS. It’s a package deal,” Shahbandar said. “In order to deal with ISIS you have to deal with the root cause. From the opposition’s perspective it’s all the same effort. It’s the same campaign. It’s interlinked.”
For President Obama, the war against ISIS and the war against Assad are very different. In 2012, Obama refused to arm the FSA to fight Assad despite urging from several of his top officials, including Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Martin Dempsey, and David Petraeus.
He told The New York Times last month that the whole idea that arming the moderate rebels would have helped them defeat the Assad regime was a “fantasy.” Obama's top intelligence advisers told him recently that partnering with the FSA against ISIS was too big a risk to take.
In a private meeting with lawmakers this summer, the president called criticism of his refusal to arm the moderate rebels “horseshit.”
But on Thursday, Earnest repeated an assertion made by former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on CNN that the White House didn’t arm the rebels in 2012 because they were not as effective as they are now. (“Because of the support that we've already provided to the Syrian opposition over the last year—that support has taken both military and non-military forms the capacity of the Syrian opposition is—is bigger, is broader, is stronger,” Earnest said.) Carney got into an argument about that assertion on air Wednesday night with Sen. John McCain, who said that the rebels are actually much worse off after years of getting pounded by both ISIS and Assad.
“It’s unbelievable. They’ve been decimated. And for [the White House] to say they are stronger and more viable is an outright lie that is beyond anything I have encountered with any president. I’m not kidding,” McCain told The Daily Beast on Thursday. “They can still be restored, but they have been harmed very seriously harmed by both ISIS and Assad and that has really reduced their size and capability.”
Both Syrian opposition leaders and U.S. lawmakers said Thursday they were skeptical that Obama’s new zeal for arming the rebels would be followed by a real effort to arm the rebels in a way that could change the momentum on the battlefield. Several times before the Obama administration has said it was increasing aid to the rebels without delivering.
“They are very skeptical because they have heard this on numerous occasions in the past,” McCain said. “I’m also suspicious of their commitment. I wonder if he’s really giving it lip service or if he’s going to really get behind it.”
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Syrian Kurds say air strikes against Isis are not working
Isis fighters have pushed to the edge of Kobani and evade western strikes, says spokesman for Kurdish fighters
US-led air strikes in northern Syria have failed to interrupt the advance of Islamic State (Isis) fighters closing in on a key city on the Turkish border, raising questions about the western strategy for defeating the jihadi movement.
Almost two weeks after the Pentagon extended its aerial campaign from Iraq to neighbouring Syria in an attempt to take on Isis militants in their desert strongholds, Kurdish fighters said the bombing campaign was having little impact in driving them back.
Isis units have edged to within two kilometres of the centre of Kobani, according to Kurds fighting a rearguard action inside the city. The jihadis, who this weekend generated further outrage with the murder of the British hostage Alan Henning, are simply too numerous to be cowed by the air assault by US fighter jets, the Kurds say.
“Air strikes alone are really not enough to defeat Isis in Kobani,” said Idris Nassan, a senior spokesman for the Kurdish fighters desperately trying to defend the important strategic redoubt from the advancing militants. “They are besieging the city on three sides, and fighter jets simply cannot hit each and every Isis fighter on the ground.”
He said Isis had adapted its tactics to military strikes from the air. “Each time a jet approaches, they leave their open positions, they scatter and hide. What we really need is ground support. We need heavy weapons and ammunition in order to fend them off and defeat them.”
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has reported that warplanes have carried out repeated strikes in recent nights around Kobani. The Pentagon has reported daily on its aerial missions over Iraq and Syria since first deciding to go after Isis two months ago. But it does not pinpoint exact locations. “Two strikes north-west of Raqqa struck a large (Isis) unit and destroyed six firing positions,” it said on Sunday in a statement. Kobani is north-west of Raqqa.
But the claim that the aerial bombardment is not sufficient to turn the tide on the ground will unsettle those in the US-led coalition, including the UK government, who have signed up to an air war as the best way of taking the fight to Isis.
In Washington, military hawks continue to argue for an escalation of the war in Syria and Iraq with the deployment of US ground troops – a move that Barack Obama has repeatedly ruled out.
“The strategy of aerial bombardment is not going to work to destroy Isil [Isis],” the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham told CNN. “You cannot destroy Isil without a ground component.” He argued that training the inexperienced fighters of the Free Syrian Army in Saudi Arabia was “militarily unsound” and “will lead to their slaughter”.
His words were echoed in London by the former chief of the defence staff General Sir David Richards. “Air power alone will not win a campaign like this,” he told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show. “It isn’t actually a counter-terrorist operation. This is a conventional enemy in that it has armour, tanks, artillery … it is quite wealthy, it holds ground and it is going to fight. So therefore you have to view it as a conventional military campaign.”
Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, disagreed. “How you respond is not quite as straightforward as David Richards, much as I respect him, suggests,” he said. “I don’t think it is a question of simply ramping up conventional armed forces again as if we were fighting state-to-state conflicts.”
Clegg said states would cooperate in a “jigsaw” operation in which different countries bring different capabilities against “stateless mobile troops”. But Britain has thus far committed only to air strikes over Iraq, and Clegg said he was opposed to stepping up the British action. “I wouldn’t advocate extending the air campaign into Syria which is why we didn’t do it last week,” he said. The prime minister,
David Cameron, will not propose a vote on Syrian air strikes unless the Lib Dems and Labour agree.
But appetite to confront Isis remains undiminished in the light of the grim succession of the murders of hostages. Cameron vowed at the weekend to use “all the assets we have” to secure justice for Henning, whose murder was broadcast online on Friday night, making him the fourth captive to be killed in six weeks. Isis has threatened to kill an American aid worker, Peter Kassig, next.
Kobani has emerged as the most important flashpoint between Kurds and jihadists in Syria because of the strategic importance of the city and the sheer numbers of Kurds who sought refuge there in recent months. More than 160,000 have fled to Turkey in the face of the Isis advance, sharply aggravating historic tensions between Turks and Kurds. On Sunday, a stray shell hit a village on the Turkish side of the border, injuring five people.
MPs and representatives of Kurdish groups in Turkey arrived at the border to show solidarity with Syrian Kurds and to form a “human chain” stretching along villages bordering Kobani. Meanwhile, Saleh Muslim, co-chair of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union party (PYD), went to Ankara this weekend to hold meetings with Turkish security officials to discuss possible Turkish assistance in defending Kobani against Isis. Turkey’s government has vowed it will not sit idly by and let Kobani fall.
Turkish media reported that security officials in Ankara urged Muslim to convince the YPG, the armed wing of the PYD that is currently battling Isis in Kobani, to join the ranks of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and to “take an open stance against the Syrian regime” of Bashar al-Assad.
“We are calling on the international community to help us defend Kobani,” said Nassan.
He said the exact outcome of the meetings remained unclear, but hinted that Muslim had asked Ankara to allow for the PYD, the Syrian Kurdish affiliate of the better-known Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), to receive arms from outside of Syria.
“If Isis takes Kobani, they will be right on the border with Turkey. This concerns not only us, but Turkey, too.”
AIDING ISIS: Israel Bombs Syria For Fifth Time in 18 Months, Gives Arms, Medical Aid to Militants
December 8, 2014 By 15 Comments
Contrary to popular belief, Israel is very much involved in the destabilization of Syria21st Century Wire
SPECIAL REPORT
Israeli warplanes hit two separate areas near Syria’s capital of Damascus yesterday, including a facility at the city’s international airport. This latest attack reveals a pattern of involvement which spells out Tel Aviv’s role in the destabilzation of Syria, which includes providing intelligene, air support, arms, and medical assistance - to Islamic insurgents inside Syria.
“This afternoon, the Israeli enemy targeted two safe areas in Damascus province, namely the Dimas area and the Damascus International Airport,” said the Syrian Armed Forces General Command.
(Image Source: The Guardian)
“This afternoon, the Israeli enemy targeted two safe areas in Damascus province, namely the Dimas area and the Damascus International Airport,” said the Syrian Armed Forces General Command.
(Image Source: The Guardian)As is customary, Israeli officials refused to ‘confirm or deny’ the bombing raid, in what the Jerusalem Post describes as, “Maintaining a policy of ambiguity that is meant to allow the other side to save face and to stave off retaliation”.
Israel is claiming this, its fifth unprovoked airstrike against Syria in 18 months (see full list of attacks below), was carried out as a ‘defensive measure’, claiming that Syria was “hiding sophisticated weaponry destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon”. A Lebanese TV correspondent believes that Israel struck 10 crucial intelligence-linked locations in Syria that “belonging to Iran”. The same news outlet also reported other explosions heard near the Israeli-Lebanese border, allegedly from IDF airforce maneuvers.Israel regularly claims it is under threat from neighboring Syria and Lebanon, and has used this as justification to attack its neighbors. The Syrian government claims Israel’s latest airstrike had an ulterior motive, describing it as “direct aggression carried out to help the Syrian government’s opponents”. The ‘opponents’ Syrian officials are referring to are US-backed rebels, ISIS and Turkey. Syrian officials also stated, “This direct aggression by Israel was carried out to help the terrorists in Syria, after our armed forces secured important victories in Deir Ezzor, Aleppo and elsewhere.”
The Syrian army spoke to Press TV, who reported: “Israel’s direct support for terrorism in Syria,” saying it had targeted two ‘safe areas’ in Damascus where both civilian and military aircraft operated. The international airport in Damascus is located southeast of the capital near areas such as Eastern Ghouta, where ISIL militants have gained control over much of its territories.”
Turkey has been working together with Israel to diminish Syria’s military capability to fight off US-backed rebel terrorist groups, most notably when Israel used a Turkish military base to launch its July 5, 2013 attack on a depot in the Syrian port of Latakia.
Israel and Turkey Joint Support of FSA, al Nusra and ISIS
Israel’s strategic partnership with Turkey, a known supporter of Islamic foreign fighters in Syria (see details below), puts Israel squarely in the frame with US and GCC-backed Islamic insurgent fighting groups, including Islamic State terrorist (ISIS/ISL).
Among other sources, the Jerusalem Post reported one testimony from an ISIS fighter confirming that Turkey is funding the Islamic terrorist group. As a NATO member and close ally of the US, it is now widely understood how Turkey has played the pivotal role in helping foreign terrorist fighters and ISIS militants, in its wider effort to help destablize and exact the official US foreign policy of regime change in Damascus, Syria.
RELATED: Team America: ISIS is ‘McCain’s Army’This week, it was also confirmed how Turkey has refused to allow a U.S.-led coalition aircraft to attack ISIS jihadists which Turkey regularly allows to roam freely in and out of its country. Despite regular denials and obfuscation from officials in Washington, it’s now well known how its other close U.S. allies – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan – have all played key material roles in backing Islamic fighters including al Nusra brigades and ISIS terrorists.
Israel and ISIS: ‘Arms for Medical’ Scandal
Foreign Policy Magazine (CFR) recently published documents admitting how Israel is also treating ISIS terrorists for free in its hospitals, and providing medical care and other unidentified supplies to the insurgents. Global Research/Washington’s Blog explains the revelation:
“In the past three months, battle-hardened Syrian rebels have transported scores of wounded Syrians across a cease-fire line that has separated Israel from Syria since 1974, according to a 15-page report by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the work of the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF). Once in Israel, they receive medical treatment in a field clinic before being sent back to Syria, where, presumably, some will return to carry on the fight.”
“U.N. blue helmets responsible for monitoring the decades-old cease-fire report observing armed opposition groups “transferring 89 wounded persons” from Syrian territory into Israel, where they were received by members of the Israel Defense Forces, according to the report. The IDF returned 21 Syrians to armed opposition members back in Syria, including the bodies of two who died.”
AID & COMFORT: Israel President Benjamin Netanyahu greets and congratulates Syrian Islamic terrorist at Israeli hospital.
Israel’s assistance to terrorist rebels in Syria is not limited to medical, as the Times of Israel reported in September 2014, about Israel’s ‘Arms for Medical’ exchange with Syrian insurgents:
“A Free Syrian Army commander, arrested last month by the Islamist militia Al-Nusra Front, told his captors he collaborated with Israel in return for medical and military support, in a video released this week.In a video uploaded to YouTube Monday … Sharif As-Safouri, the commander of the Free Syrian Army’s Al-Haramein Battalion, admitted to having entered Israel five times to meet with Israeli officers who later provided him with Soviet anti-tank weapons and light arms. Safouri was abducted by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front in the Quneitra area, near the Israeli border, on July 22.“The [opposition] factions would receive support and send the injured in [to Israel] on condition that the Israeli fence area is secured. No person was allowed to come near the fence without prior coordination with Israel authorities,” Safouri said in the video.
“In the edited confession video, in which Safouri seems physically unharmed, he says that at first he met with an Israeli officer named Ashraf at the border and was given an Israeli cellular phone. He later met with another officer named Younis and with the two men’s commander, Abu Daoud. In total, Safouri said he entered Israel five times for meetings that took place in Tiberias. Following the meetings, Israel began providing Safouri and his men with “basic medical support and clothes” as well as weapons, which included 30 Russian [rifles], 10 RPG launchers with 47 rockets, and 48,000 5.56 millimeter bullets.”
In March, Haaretz also reported:
In addition to this, on Sept 23, 2014, Israel used its air defense support to provide air cover to Islamic militants (ISIS) in Syria’s Golan Heights region when an IDF Patriot Missile battery shot down a Syrian MIG21, allegedly because it “violated Israeli airspace”. The timing of the Israeli move was somewhat uncanny – coming just after the US launched its unilateral attack on Islamic State targets in northeastern Syria.“The Syrian opposition is willing to give up claims to the Golan Heights in return for cash and Israeli military aid against President Bashar Assad, a top opposition official told Al Arab newspaper, according to a report in Al Alam. (…) The Western-backed militant groups want Israel to enforce a no-fly zone over parts of southern Syria to protect rebel bases from air strikes by Assad’s forces, according to the report.”
Just one week before the Israeli attack, Jabhat al-Nusra fighters drove out hundreds of UN peacekeepers from the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, taking their uniforms and vehicles, and terrorist fighters “had succeeded in occupying all of the Syrian side” of the Golan Heights, forcing troops from the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) to retreat. It’s well known about Israel’s desire to retake the Golan Heights and the Civil War in Syria may provide them with the perfect cover they need to achieve this.
Israel’s support of Islamic militants in Syria also includes supplying strategic information to ISIS/ISIL fighters operating inside Syria. Alexander Prokhanov, a senior aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, told Press TV on Dec 7, 2014, that the Israeli Mossad spy agency has been providing key data and information, as well as ‘training assistance’ to ISIS/ISIL militants.Many now believe that the US and Israel’s current involvement in toppling Syria’s leadership is a continuation Israel’s Yinon Plan to decapitate the leadership of any remaining Arab nationalist governments in the Middle East and North Africa.
21WIRE journalist Andrew McKillop explains, “The plan was named after Israel’s minister of foreign affairs at the time of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and occupation of Beirut, with about 25 000 dead, this divide-and-rule geostrategy plan for the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) lives on. Victims of this strategy since 2011 – operated by Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia – are divided and weakened states like Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Egypt and even Tunisia can also possibly be added to the list. Others, like Lebanon, can be identified as likely short-term target victim countries.“
IDF STRIKE SYRIA: Aftermath of the Israeli airstrike near Damascus in May 2013.
UN Afraid to Cite Israel Over Airstrikes
Following yesterday’s attack by Israel, Syria has called for UN sanctions against Israel over its air strikes in violation of Syria’s territorial sovereignty as recognized by international law and conventions.
Al Jazeera reports, “There was no threat of retaliation, but the Syrian Foreign Ministry said on Monday it had asked Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, and the Security Council to impose sanctions on Israel, describing Sunday’s alleged attack as “a heinous crime against Syria’s sovereignty”.
Thus far, the UN policy towards Israel’s continuous attacks on its neighbors is not to mention it or ask for any accountability for any of Israel’s actions, even if it has killed civilians – a policy which is in direct contravention to both the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremburg principles forbidding undeclared wars.
Many now believe that this is because of heavy diplomatic pressure being placed, as well as threats issued by Washington DC to pull funding from UN if it ever moves against Israeli interests, which would include its numerous undeclared military incursions.
Since 2006, Israel has conducted several air strikes on Syria. Below is a description of those attacks:Damascus and Dimas attack (7 December 2014) – Alleged Israeli airstrikes in Syria against a warehouse of advanced S-300 missiles, which were en route to Hezbollah in Lebanon.[25]Missile Strike at Golan Heights (23 September 2014) - IDF Patriot Missile battery shot down a Syrian MIG21, allegedly because it violated Israeli airspace.
Beqaa Valley airstrike (24 February 2014) – Two airstrikes against an alleged Hezbollah missile base in Lebanon near the border with Syria.[21]2nd Latakia attack (26 January 2014) – Alleged Israeli airstrike against a Syrian warehouse of S-300 missiles.[20]Snawbar airstrike (30 October 2013) – Alleged Israeli airstrike at an air defense site in Snawbar.[19]Latakia explosion (5 July 2013) – Alleged Israeli airstrike on a Syrian depot containing Russian-made Yakhont anti-ship missiles.[18]Airstrikes on Syria (3-5 May 2013) – Airstrikes on Syria against alleged long-ranged weapons sent from Iran to Hezbollah.[16][17]Jamraya airstrike (30 January 2013) – Alleged Israeli airstrike on a Syrian convoy allegedly transporting weapons to Hezbollah.[14] Other sources stated the targeted site was a military research center in Jamraya responsible for developing biological and chemical weapons.[15]Operation Orchard (6 September 2007) Israeli airstrike on a ‘suspected’ nuclear reactor[4] in the Deir ez-Zor region[5] of Syria. The Israeli and U.S. governments imposed virtually total news blackouts immediately after the raid that held for seven months.[6] Ain es Saheb airstrike (5 October 2003) - Israeli Air Force operation against an alleged Palestinian militant training camp in Ain es Saheb, Syria.
Additionally, Israel has attacked Lebanon repeatedly, most notably in 2006 when it slaughtered some 1,500 Lebanoese civilians during it’s indiscriminate bombing raids hitting residential areas and targeting ‘infrastructure’ in neighboring Lebanon:
Operation Just Reward (12 July – 14 August 2006) - Israeli counterattack which began with air force bombing of Hezbollah positions in Southern Lebanon. Israel attacked Lebanon in this bloody siege which ended with 1,191 Lebanese dead in total (including combatants and foreign civilians in Lebanon) and over 4,000 injured. The IDF lost only 121 soldiers, and Israeli civilians said to have died were 43.
21WIRE contributors to this report are Peter Sterry, Jason Smith and Patrick Henningsen.
10-
Mon Dec 08, 2014 6:10
Iraqi Army Discovers Huge Depots of Israel-Made Weapons, Ammunition
TEHRAN (FNA)- The Iraqi army has discovered nearly a dozen depots of Israeli-made arms and ammunition in Diyala province, local officials disclosed on Monday.
"An Iraqi army unit has found around 10 weapons and munition depots where Israel-made weapons and explosives were kept in Hamrin mountains," the Iraqi Al-Ansar news website quoted Sadeq Al-Moussavi, a member of Diyala provincial council, as saying.
Moussavi said that the depot contained a lot of explosives, weapons and bombs all made by Israel.
On Sunday, Iraqi fighter jets hit the strongholds of the ISIL Takfiri group in Diyala province, and killed several militants.
Iraq's warplanes inflicted major losses on the Takfiri militants, after targeting their positions in Northeast of Baquba. At least 8 militants lost their lives during the strikes.
The ISIL Takfiri terrorists currently control parts of Syria and Iraq. They have threatened all communities, including Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, Ezadi Kurds and others, as they continue their atrocities in Iraq.
Senior Iraqi officials have blamed Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and some Persian Gulf Arab states for the growing terrorism in their country.
The ISIL has links with Saudi intelligence and is believed to be indirectly supported by the Israeli regime.
This is not the first time that such revelations are made about Israeli arms aids to the terrorists in the region. In February, a senior Iraqi military commander disclosed that the weapons used by ISIL in its war against both the governments of Syria and Iraq are Israeli-made.
“All weapons seized from the terrorists from 2006 onwards have been advanced weapons made in Israel,” Major General Fazel Al-Barvari, commander of Iraq’s Anti-Terrorism Golden Battalion, wrote on his Facebook page.
In June, the Syrian army discovered and seized a large cache of Israeli-made weapons and ammunition from Al-Qaeda-linked militants in Banias city of the Tartous governorate near the Lebanese borders.
The Syrian troops discovered the arms depot in al-Maydan district of Banias city arresting several armed rebels during the operations.
The security forces also confiscated several sniper rifles, thousands of bullets and forged documents as well as maps of Banias city from the armed rebels.
Syrian Special Forces seized weapons and ammunition in farmlands in Banias city and arrested an armed group in the countryside trying to flee to the Lebanese territories.
Earlier, in 2013, the Syrian army discovered and seized Israeli-made missiles and weapons from armed rebels in Reef (outskirts of) al-Qusseir in Northwestern Syria.
"In army's military operations and advancements in Reef al-Qusseir a large cache of weapons and missile ammunition, some of which are Israeli made, were seized (from the armed rebels)," the Arabic-language al-Ahad news website quoted an informed local source as saying then.
The source said that confiscation of such weapons shows the involvement of the Zionist regime in incidents which are happening in Syria and reveals the ties between the regime and opponents of the Syrian government.
In a similar development in December 2012, the Syrian army seized Israeli-made missiles and weapons from the armed rebels near the border with Jordan.
The army confiscated (from terrorists) Israeli-made LAV anti-tank missiles and several wireless equipment which were also made in Israel, Jahineh news website reported at the time.
The Syrian army also prevented the armed rebels from crossing into Syria via neighboring Jordan.
11-
Russia Demands Israel Explain Weekend Attack on Syria
Urges UN to Prevent Future Attacks
by Jason Ditz, December 08, 2014
Israel attacked around 10 sites, mostly around the Damascus Airport, and while it’s unclear what was hit, some reports suggested it included Russian anti-aircraft defenses which were being provided to Syria.Syria and Iran both condemned the Israeli attacks too, but those are unsurprising, and Russia normally doesn’t get directly involved in Israel’s intermittent attacks on Syria.
The Russian Foreign Ministry also pushed the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon over the attack, urging him to take steps to ensure that such attacks are not repeated.
Israel, for its part, is refusing to confirm or deny the attacks, nor is it offering any explanation for what it attacked, or why. They attack Syria fairly often, so from their perspective it might not be seen as worth responding to.
12-
America on “Hot War Footing” as House Paves Way for War with Russia
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, December 05, 2014
America is on a war footing. While, a World War Three Scenario has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than ten years, military action against Russia is now contemplated at an “operational level”. Similarly, both the Senate and the House have introduced enabling legislation which provides legitimacy to conduct a war against Russia.We are not dealing with a “Cold War”. None of the safeguards of the Cold War era prevail.
There has been a breakdown in East-West diplomacy coupled with extensive war propaganda. In turn the United Nations has turned a blind eye to extensive war crimes committed by the Western military alliance.
Russia encircled
Global security is at stake. This historic vote –which potentially could affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people Worldwide– has received virtually no media coverage. A total media blackout prevails.
The World is at a dangerous crossroads. Moscow has responded to US-NATO threats. Its borders are threatened.
On December 3, the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation announced the inauguration of a new military-political entity which would take over in the case of war.
Russia is launching a new national defense facility, which is meant to monitor threats to national security in peacetime, but would take control of the entire country in case of war. (RT, December 3, 2014)Timeline of War Preparations
In May 2014, the Russian Aggression Prevention Act (RAPA) was introduced in the US Senate (S 2277), calling for the militarization of Eastern Europe and the Baltic States and the stationing of US and NATO troops on Russia’s doorstep:
S.2277 – Russian Aggression Prevention Act of 2014
Directs the President to: (1) implement a plan for increasing U.S. and NATO support for the armed forces of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, and other NATO member-states; and (2) direct the U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO to seek consideration forpermanently basing NATO forces in such countries.
Directs the President to submit a plan to Congress for accelerating NATO and European missile defense efforts.
While The S 2277 resolution was sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for review, its essential premises are already in the process of being implemented. In mid-July, NATO’s Europe commander General Philip Breedlove in consultation with the Pentagon and Britain’s Ministry of Defence, called for:
“stockpiling a base in Poland with enough weapons, ammunition and other supplies to support a rapid deployment of thousands of troops against Russia”.(RT, July 24, 2014).According to General Breedlove, NATO needs “pre-positioned supplies, pre-positioned capabilities and a basing area ready to rapidly accept follow-on forces”:
“He plans to recommend placing supplies — weapons, ammunition and ration packs — at the headquarters to enable a sudden influx of thousands of Nato troops”(Times, August 22, 2014, emphasis added)Breedlove’s “Blitzkrieg scenario” –which could potentially lead to military escalation– was reaffirmed at the September NATO Summit in Wales. A so-called NATO action plan directed against the Russian Federation was decided upon. The Wales Summit had given the “green light”.
Barely a month later, in October, US-NATO military drills were held in the Baltic States. In early November, a second round of drills was held in both the Baltic States and Eastern Europe.
As part of this broader endeavour, NATO’s Iron Sword 2014 military exercises –involving the participation of nine member countries of the Atlantic Alliance– were launched in Lithuania in early November:
”US tanks rolled in to Lithuania earlier this month is a show of force to Russia that it’s not welcome in the region.”The military exercises were explicitly directed against Russia. According to Moscow, they consisted in “increasing operation readiness” as well the transfer of NATO “military infrastructure to the Russian borders”.
In response to NATO deployments on Russia’s borders, the Russian Federation also conducted in early November extensive war games in the sea of Barent. The Russian drills consisted in testing “its entire nuclear triad consisting of strategic bombers; submarines” and the “silo-based Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Plesetsk in Arkhangelsk Oblast” on November 1st.
The US House of Representatives H.Res. 758 Resolution
On 18 November, a major resolution H. Res. 758 was introduced in the House of Representatives. Its main thrust consists in portraying Russia as an “Aggressor Nation”, which has invaded Ukraine and calling for military action directed against Russia:
You can watch Rep. Kinzinger’s floor speech on the legislation
H.RES.758 — Whereas upon entering office in 2009, President Barack Obama announced his intention to `reset’ relations with the Russian Federation, which was described by former United States Ambassador… (Introduced in House – IH)
HRES 758 IH
113th CONGRESS
2d Session
H. RES. 758
Strongly condemning the actions of the Russian Federation, under President Vladimir Putin, which has carried out a policy of aggression against neighboring countries aimed at political and economic domination.
(The full text of H. RES. 758 is contained in annex to this article)
Putin says Russia not isolated over Ukraine, blames West for frosty ties.
An attack on one member of the Atlantic alliance is an attack on all members of the Alliance.The underlying narrative is supported by a string of baseless accusations directed against the Russian Federation. It accuses Russia of having invaded Ukraine. It states without evidence that Russia was behind the downing of Malaysian Airlines MH17, it accuses Russia of military aggression.
Ironically, it also accuses the Russian Federation of having imposed economic sanctions not only on Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova but also on several unnamed member states of the European Union. The resolution accuses the Russian Federation of having used “the supply of energy for political and economic coercion.”
In essence, House Resolution 758 were it to become law would provide a de facto green light to the President of the United States to declare war on the Russian Federation, without the formal permission of the US Congress.
In this regard, it could be interpreted as “mildly unconstitutional” in that it contravenes the substance of Article 1, Section 8, of the US Constitution which vests in the Congress “the Power to declare war…”
The resolution urges the President of the United States in consultation with the US Congress to:
“conduct a review of the force posture, readiness, and responsibilities of the United States Armed Forces and the forces of other members of NATO to determine if the contributions and actions of each is sufficient to meet the obligations of collective self defence under article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and to specify the measures needed to remedy any deficiencies” .What the above paragraph suggests is that the US is contemplating the use of NATO’s collective security doctrine under article 5 with a views to triggering a process of military confrontation with the Russian Federation.
The structure of military alliances is of crucial significance. Washington’s intent is to isolate Russia. Article 5 is a convenient mechanism imposed by the US on Western Europe. It forces NATO member states, most of which are members of the European Union, to act wage war on Washington’s behalf.
Moreover, a referendum on Ukraine’s membership in NATO is contemplated. In case Ukraine becomes a member of NATO and/or redefines its security agreement with NATO, article 5 could be invoked as a justification to wage a NATO sponsored war on Russia.
“Fast Legislation”
Click image below to order Michel Chossudovsky’s book
The speed at which this legislation was adopted is unusual in US Congressional history.
House resolution 758 was introduced on November 18th, it was rushed off to the Foreign Affairs Committee and rushed back to the plenary of the House for debate and adoption.Two weeks (16 days) after it was first introduced by Rep. Kinzinger (Illinois) on November 18, it was adopted by 411-10 in an almost unanimous vote on the morning of December 4th.
Members of Congress are puppets. Their vote is controlled by Washington’s lobby groups. For the defence contractors, Wall Street and the Texas oil giants, “war is good for business”.
In the words of Dennis Kucinich in an open letter published on December 2:
The resolution demands Russia to be isolated … In other words, ‘let’s get ready for war with Russia.’Media Blackout
This is exactly the type of sabre rattling which led to the initiation and escalation of the Cold War. It is time we demanded that the US employ diplomacy, not more military expenditures, in the quest for international order.
One would expect that this historic decision would has been the object of extensive news coverage.
In fact what happened was a total news blackout.
The nation’s media failed to provide coverage of the debate in House of Representatives and the adoption of H Res 758 on December 4.
The mainstream media had been instructed not to cover the Congressional decision.
Nobody dared to raise its dramatic implications. its impacts on “global security”. ”World War III is not front page news.”
And without mainstream news concerning US-NATO war preparations, the broader public remains unaware of the importance of the Congressional decision. .
In Annex to this article is the google news feed for H. Rep. 758 (7pm ET prior to the publication of this article). We suggest that readers check the news feed on online search engines as well as print media.
Spread the word. Reverse the tide of war.
Break the mainstream media blackout.
Google News Feed 7pm ET, December 4, 2014. Last 24 hours.The Vote in the House of Representatives took place in the morning of December 4th, ET.
last 24 hours (image icons removed)
Search Results
- Ukraine’s Finance Minister: “Made in the USA”: Kiev Government …Center for Research on Globalization-4 hours ago
- Bearing that in mind, a bill known as H.Res.758 was recently introduced in the U.S. Congress. … The danger of this bill was highlighted by former U.S. Rep.
- Rep. Kinzinger Blasts Russia: ‘This Aggression Will Not Stand’Kinzinger is the sponsor of H. Res. 758, which formally condemns Russia for its military aggression and calls for the Russian Federation to remove its troops …
- Washington Free Beacon-7 hours ago
- Kinzinger resolution condemns Russian aggression
The Rock River Times-1 hour ago
- BBC News
- U.S. House Vote Could Lead to War with Russia, Warns Physicians …H. Res 758, “Strongly condemning the actions of the Russian Federation, under … countries aimed at political and economic domination,” is credited to Rep.
- PR Newswire (press release)-59 minutes ago
- the Nightly Whip: Wednesday, December 3, 2014H.R. 5759 – “Executive Amnesty Prevention Act of 2014” (Rep. … H.Res. 758 – Strongly condemning the actions of the Russian Federation, under Vladimir Putin, …
- Newsroom America-17 hours ago
- Stay up to date on results for H. Rep. 758
Bill Text
113th Congress (2013-2014)
H.RES.758.IH
H.RES.758 — Whereas upon entering office in 2009, President Barack Obama announced his intention to `reset’ relations with the Russian Federation, which was described by former United States Ambassador… (Introduced in House – IH)
HRES 758 IH
113th CONGRESS2d SessionH. RES. 758Strongly condemning the actions of the Russian Federation, under President Vladimir Putin, which has carried out a policy of aggression against neighboring countries aimed at political and economic domination.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVESNovember 18, 2014Mr. KINZINGER of Illinois submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs
RESOLUTIONStrongly condemning the actions of the Russian Federation, under President Vladimir Putin, which has carried out a policy of aggression against neighboring countries aimed at political and economic domination.
Whereas upon entering office in 2009, President Barack Obama announced his intention to `reset’ relations with the Russian Federation, which was described by former United States Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul as a policy to `engage with Russia to seek agreement on common interests’, which included the negotiation of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in which the United States agreed to major reductions in its nuclear forces;
Whereas the Russian Federation has responded to this policy with openly anti-American rhetoric and actions and with armed aggression against United States allies and partner countries, including Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia;
Whereas the Russian Federation has subjected Ukraine to a campaign of political, economic, and military aggression for the purpose of establishing its domination over the country and progressively erasing its independence;
Whereas the Russian Federation’s invasion of, and military operations on, Ukrainian territory represent gross violations of Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity and a violation of international law, including the Russian Federation’s obligations under the United Nations Charter;
Whereas the Russian Federation’s forcible occupation and illegal annexation of Crimea and its continuing support for separatist and paramilitary forces in eastern Ukraine are violations of its obligations under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, in which it pledged to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine and to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine;
Whereas the Russian Federation has provided military equipment, training, and other assistance to separatist and paramilitary forces in eastern Ukraine that has resulted in over 4,000 civilian deaths, hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees, and widespread destruction;
Whereas the Ukrainian military remains at a significant disadvantage compared to the armed forces of the Russian Federation in terms of size and technological sophistication;
Whereas the United States strongly supports efforts to assist Ukraine to defend its territory and sovereignty against military aggression by the Russian Federation and by separatist forces;
Whereas the terms of the ceasefire specified in the Minsk Protocol that was signed on September 5, 2014, by representatives of the Government of Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and the Russian-backed separatists in the eastern area of the Ukraine have been repeatedly violated by the Russian Federation and the separatist forces it supports;
Whereas separatist forces in areas they controlled in eastern Ukraine prevented the holding of elections on May 25, 2014, for a new President of Ukraine and on October 26, 2014, for a new Rada, thereby preventing the people of eastern Ukraine from exercising their democratic right to select their candidates for office in free and fair elections;
Whereas, on November 2, 2014, separatist forces in eastern Ukraine held fraudulent and illegal elections in areas they controlled for the supposed purpose of choosing leaders of the illegitimate local political entities they have declared;
Whereas the Russian Federation has recognized the results of the illegal elections and continues to provide the military, political, and economic support without which the separatist forces could not continue to maintain their areas of control;
Whereas the reestablishment of peace and security in Ukraine requires the full withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory, the resumption of the government’s control over all of the country’s international borders, the disarming of the separatist and paramilitary forces in the east, an end to Russia’s use of its energy exports and trade barriers to apply economic and political pressure, and an end to Russian interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs;
Whereas Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a civilian airliner, was destroyed by a Russian-made missile provided by the Russian Federation to separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, resulting in the loss of 298 innocent lives;
Whereas the Russian Federation has used and is continuing to use coercive economic measures, including the manipulation of energy prices and supplies, as well as trade restrictions, to place political and economic pressure on Ukraine;
Whereas military forces of the Russian Federation and of the separatists it controls have repeatedly violated the terms of the ceasefire agreement announced on September 5, 2014;
Whereas the Russian Federation invaded the Republic of Georgia in August 2008, continues to station military forces in the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and is implementing measures intended to progressively integrate these regions into the Russian Federation;
Whereas the Russian Federation continues to subject the Republic of Georgia to political and military intimidation, economic coercion, and other forms of aggression in an effort to establish its control of the country and to prevent Georgia from establishing closer relations with the European Union and the United States;
Whereas the Russian Federation continues to station military forces in the Transniestria region of Moldova;
Whereas the Russian Federation continues to provide support to the illegal separatist regime in the Transniestria region of Moldova;
Whereas the Russian Federation continues to subject Moldova to political and military intimidation, economic coercion, and other forms of aggression in an effort to establish its control of the countries and to prevent efforts by Moldova to establish closer relations with the European Union and the United States;
Whereas under the terms of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a flight-test or deployment of any INF-banned weapon delivery vehicle by the Russian Federation constitutes a violation of the INF Treaty;
Whereas, on July 29, 2014, the United States Department of State released its report on the Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments, as required by Section 403 of the Arms Control and Disarmament Act, for calendar year 2013, which found that, `[t]he United States has determined that the Russian Federation is in violation of its obligations under the INF Treaty not to possess, produce, or flight-test a ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) with a range capability of 500 km to 5,500 km, or to possess or produce launchers of such missiles’;
Whereas according to reports, the Government of the Russian Federation has repeatedly engaged in the infiltration of, and attacks on, computer networks of the United States Government, as well as individuals and private entities, for the purpose of illicitly acquiring information and disrupting operations, including by supporting Russian individuals and entities engaged in these actions;
Whereas the political, military, and economic aggression against Ukraine and other countries by the Russian Federation underscores the enduring importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the cornerstone of collective Euro-Atlantic defense;
Whereas the United States reaffirms its obligations under the North Atlantic Treaty, especially Article 5 which states that `an armed attack against one or more’ of the treaty signatories `shall be considered an attack against them all’;
Whereas the Russian Federation is continuing to use its supply of energy as a means of political and economic coercion against Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other European countries;
Whereas the United States strongly supports energy diversification initiatives in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other European countries to reduce the ability of the Russian Federation to use its supply of energy for political and economic coercion, including the development of domestic sources of energy, increased efficiency, and substituting Russian energy resources with imports from other countries;
Whereas the Russian Federation continues to conduct an aggressive propaganda effort in Ukraine in which false information is used to subvert the authority of the legitimate national government, undermine stability, promote ethnic dissension, and incite violence;
Whereas the Russian Federation has expanded the presence of its state-sponsored media in national languages across central and western Europe with the intent of using news and information to distort public opinion and obscure Russian political and economic influence in Europe;
Whereas expanded efforts by United States international broadcasting across all media in the Russian and Ukrainian languages are needed to counter Russian propaganda and to provide the people of Ukraine and the surrounding regions with access to credible and balanced information;
Whereas the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Incorporated continue to represent a minority market share in Ukraine and other regional states with significant ethno-linguistic Russian populations who increasingly obtain their local and international news from Russian state-sponsored media outlets;
Whereas the United States International Programming to Ukraine and Neighboring Regions Act of 2014 (Public Law 113-96) requires the Voice of America and RFE/RL, Incorporated to provide programming content to target populations in Ukraine and Moldova 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including at least 8 weekly hours of total original video and television content and 14 weekly hours of total audio content while expanding cooperation with local media outlets and deploying greater content through multimedia platforms and mobile devices; and
Whereas Vladimir Putin has established an increasingly authoritarian regime in the Russian Federation through fraudulent elections, the persecution and jailing of political opponents, the elimination of independent media, the seizure of key sectors of the economy and enabling supporters to enrich themselves through widespread corruption, and implementing a strident propaganda campaign to justify Russian aggression against other countries and repression in Russia, among other actions: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved,
- That the House of Representatives–
- (1) strongly supports the efforts by President Poroshenko and the people of Ukraine to establish a lasting peace in their country that includes the full withdrawal of Russian forces from its territory, full control of its international borders, the disarming of separatist and paramilitary forces eastern Ukraine, the adoption of policies to reduce the ability of the Russian Federation to use energy exports and trade barriers as weapons to apply economic and political pressure, and an end to interference by the Russian Federation in the internal affairs of Ukraine;
- (2) affirms the right of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and all countries to exercise their sovereign rights within their internationally recognized borders free from outside intervention and to conduct their foreign policy in accordance with their determination of the best interests of their peoples;
- (3) condemns the continuing political, economic, and military aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova and the continuing violation of their sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity;
- (4) states that the military intervention by the Russian Federation in Ukraine–
- (A) is in breach of its obligations under the United Nations Charter;
- (B) is in violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in which it pledged to respect the independence, sovereignty, and existing borders of Ukraine and to refrain from the threat of the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine; and
- (C) poses a threat to international peace and security;
- (5) calls on the Russian Federation to reverse its illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula, to end its support of the separatist forces in Crimea, and to remove its military forces from that region other than those operating in strict accordance with its 1997 agreement on the Status and Conditions of the Black Sea Fleet Stationing on the Territory of Ukraine;
- (6) calls on the President to cooperate with United States allies and partners in Europe and other countries around the world to refuse to recognize the illegal annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation;
- (7) calls on the Russian Federation to remove its military forces and military equipment from the territory of Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, and to end its political, military, and economic support of separatist forces;
- (8) calls on the Russian Federation and the separatist forces it controls in Ukraine to end their violations of the ceasefire announced in Minsk on September 5, 2014;
- (9) calls on the President to cooperate with United States allies and partners in Europe and other countries around the world to impose visa bans, targeted asset freezes, sectoral sanctions, and other measures on the Russian Federation and its leadership with the goal of compelling it to end its violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, to remove its military forces and equipment from Ukrainian territory, and to end its support of separatist and paramilitary forces;
- (10) calls on the President to provide the Government of Ukraine with defense articles, services, and training required to effectively defend its territory and sovereignty;
- (11) calls on the President to provide the Government of Ukraine with appropriate intelligence and other relevant information to assist the Government of Ukraine to defend its territory and sovereignty;
- (12) calls on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies and United States partners in Europe and other nations around the world to suspend all military cooperation with Russia, including prohibiting the sale to the Russian Government of lethal and non-lethal military equipment;
- (13) reaffirms the commitment of the United States to its obligations under the North Atlantic Treaty, especially Article 5, and calls on all Alliance member states to provide their full share of the resources needed to ensure their collective defense;
- (14) urges the President, in consultation with Congress, to conduct a review of the force posture, readiness, and responsibilities of United States Armed Forces and the forces of other members of NATO to determine if the contributions and actions of each are sufficient to meet the obligations of collective self-defense under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and to specify the measures needed to remedy any deficiencies;
- (15) urges the President to hold the Russian Federation accountable for violations of its obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and to take action to bring the Russian Federation back into compliance with the Treaty;
- (16) urges the President to conduct a review of the utility of the INF Treaty in securing United States interests and the consequences for the United States of withdrawing from the Treaty if the Russian Federation does not return to compliance with its provisions;
- (17) calls on Ukraine, the European Union, and other countries in Europe to support energy diversification initiatives to reduce the ability of the Russian Federation to use its supply of energy as a means of applying political and economic pressure on other countries, including by promoting increased natural gas and other energy exports from the United States and other countries;
- (18) urges the President to expedite the United States Department of Energy’s approval of liquefied natural gas exports to Ukraine and other European countries;
- (19) calls on the President and the United States Department of State to develop a strategy for multilateral coordination to produce or otherwise procure and distribute news and information in the Russian language to countries with significant Russian-speaking populations which maximizes the use of existing platforms for content delivery such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Incorporated, leverages indigenous public-private partnerships for content production, and seeks in-kind contributions from regional state governments;
- (20) calls on the United States Department of State to identify positions at key diplomatic posts in Europe to evaluate the political, economic, and cultural influence of Russia and Russian state-sponsored media and to coordinate with host governments on appropriate responses;
- (21) calls upon the Russian Federation to seek a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States that is based on respect for the independence and sovereignty of all countries and their right to freely determine their future, including their relationship with other nations and international organizations, without interference, intimidation, or coercion by other countries; and
https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-resolution/758
To download the text of the Resolution Click: H Res 748
Click for Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, French, translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.
SOURCE: Information Clearing House
Copyright © Prof Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 2014
Also see:
- Ron Paul: Reckless Congress Declares War on Russia
- President Putin’s 2014 Federal Assembly Address: “Talking To Russia From A Position Of Force Is An Exercise In Futility”
Debbie Menon
Founder and General Manager at My Cat Bird Seat
Debbie Menon is an independent writer based in Dubai. She is Editor-in-Chief of two websites: MyCatBirdSeat.com and VeteransNewsNow.com
Her main focus are the US-Mid-East Conflicts. Her writing has been featured in several print and online publications in the Middle East. She is committed to exposing(AIPAC) the Israel Lobby's control of American policy for the Middle East.
Control which amounts to treason by the Zionist Lobbies in America and its stooges in Congress, and that guarantees there can never be a peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflicts, only catastrophe for all, in the region and the world.
Her mission is to inform and educate the public on issues of the US/Middle East conflicts that are unreported, underreported, or distorted in the Zionist ownedAmerican Media.
Her writing reflects the incredible resilience, almost superhuman steadfastness of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians, who are now facing the prospect of a final round of ethnic cleansing.
Her mission is to inform and educate internet viewers seeking unfiltered information about real events on issues of the US/Middle East conflicts that are unreported, underreported, or distorted in the American media.
The purpose is to look at the current reality from a different and critical perspective, not to simply rehash the pro-US/Israel perspective, smoke and mirrors that has been allowed to utterly and completely dominate Mainstream discourse.
PS: For those of her detractors that think she is being selective and even “one sided,” tough, that is the point of her work, to present an alternative view and interpretation of the US-Israel-Middle East conflict, that has been completely ignored in mainstream discourse and denied the US public. Oh, and she is not Muslim or Palestinian and not married to one either!Sorry to disappoint you!She is practicing Roman catholic.
Her main focus are the US-Mid-East Conflicts. Her writing has been featured in several print and online publications in the Middle East. She is committed to exposing(AIPAC) the Israel Lobby's control of American policy for the Middle East.
Control which amounts to treason by the Zionist Lobbies in America and its stooges in Congress, and that guarantees there can never be a peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflicts, only catastrophe for all, in the region and the world.
Her mission is to inform and educate the public on issues of the US/Middle East conflicts that are unreported, underreported, or distorted in the Zionist ownedAmerican Media.
Her writing reflects the incredible resilience, almost superhuman steadfastness of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians, who are now facing the prospect of a final round of ethnic cleansing.
Her mission is to inform and educate internet viewers seeking unfiltered information about real events on issues of the US/Middle East conflicts that are unreported, underreported, or distorted in the American media.
The purpose is to look at the current reality from a different and critical perspective, not to simply rehash the pro-US/Israel perspective, smoke and mirrors that has been allowed to utterly and completely dominate Mainstream discourse.
PS: For those of her detractors that think she is being selective and even “one sided,” tough, that is the point of her work, to present an alternative view and interpretation of the US-Israel-Middle East conflict, that has been completely ignored in mainstream discourse and denied the US public. Oh, and she is not Muslim or Palestinian and not married to one either!Sorry to disappoint you!She is practicing Roman catholic.
13-
‘Palestine is not an environment story’
How I was censored by The Guardian for writing about Israel’s war for Gaza’s gas
After writing for The Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale. In doing so, The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was obligated to protect under my contract. I’m speaking out because I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world’s leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel’s publicised rationale for going to war.
Gaza’s gas
I joined the Guardian as an environment blogger in April 2013. Prior to this, I had been an author, academic and freelance journalist for over a decade, writing for The Independent, Independent on Sunday, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, among others.
On 9th July 2014, I posted an article via my Earth Insight blog at The Guardian’s environment website, exposing the role of Palestinian resources, specifically Gaza’s off-shore natural gas reserves, in partly motivating Israel’s invasion of Gaza aka ‘Operation Protective Edge.’ Among the sources I referred to was a policy paper written by incumbent Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya’alon one year before Operation Cast Lead, underscoring that the Palestinians could never be allowed to develop their own energy resources as any revenues would go to supporting Palestinian terrorism.
The article now has 68,000 social media shares, and is by far the single most popular article on the Gaza conflict to date. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Israel has seen control of Gaza’s gas as a major strategic priority over the last decade for three main reasons.
Firstly, Israel faces a near-term gas crisis — largely due to the long lead time needed to bring Israel’s considerable domestic gas resources into production; secondly, Netanyahu’s administration cannot stomach any scenario in which a Hamas-run Palestinian administration accesses and develops their own resources; thirdly, Israel wants to use Palestinian gas as a strategic bridge to cement deals with Arab dictatorships whose domestic populations oppose signing deals with Israel.
Either way, the biggest obstacle to Israel accessing Gaza’s gas is the Hamas-run administration in the strip, which rejects all previous agreements that Israel had pursued to develop the gas with the British Gas Group and the Palestinian Authority.
Censorship in the land of the free
Since 2006, The Guardian has loudly trumpeted its aim to be the world’s leading liberal voice. For years, the paper has sponsored the annual Index on Censorship’s prestigious Freedom of Expression Award. The paper won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the National Security Agency (NSA). Generally, the newspaper goes out of its way to dress itself up as standing at the forefront of fighting censorship, particularly in the media landscape. This is why its approach to my Gaza gas story is so disturbing.
The day after posting it, I received a phone call from James Randerson, assistant national news editor. He sounded riled and rushed. Without beating around the bush, James told me point blank that my Guardian blog was to be immediately discontinued. Not because my article was incorrect, factually flawed, or outrageously defamatory. Not because I’d somehow breached journalistic ethics, or violated my contract. No. The Gaza gas piece, he said, was “not an environment story,” and therefore was an “inappropriate post” for the Guardian’s environment website:
“You’re writing too many non-environment stories, so I’m afraid we just don’t have any other option. This article doesn’t belong on the environment site. It should really be on Cif [i.e. the Guardian’s online opinion section known as ‘Comment Is Free’].”
I was shocked, and more than a little baffled. As you can read on my Guardian profile, my remit was to cover “the geopolitics of environmental, energy and economic crises.” That was what I was commissioned to do — indeed, when I had applied in late 2012 to blog for The Guardian, an earlier piece I’d written on the link between Israeli military operations and Gaza’s gas in Le Monde diplomatique was part of my portfolio.
So I suggested to James that termination was somewhat of an overreaction. Perhaps we could simply have a meeting to discuss the editorial issues and work out together what my remit should be. “I’d be happy to cooperate as much as possible,” I said. I didn’t want to lose my contract. James refused point blank, instead telling me that my “interests are increasingly about issues that we don’t think are a good fit for what we want to see published on the environment site.”
In the end, my polite protestations got nowhere. Within the hour, I received an email from a rights manager at The Guardian informing me that they had terminated my contract.
Under that contract, however, I had editorial control over what I wrote on my blog — obviously within the remit that I had been commissioned for. From May to April, environment bloggers underwent training and supervision to ensure that we would eventually be up to speed to post on the site independently based on our own editorial judgement. The terms and conditions we signed up to under our contract state:
“You shall regularly maintain Your Blog and shall determine its content. You shall launch Your own posts which shall not be sub-edited by GNM. GNM occasionally might raise topics of interest with You suitable for Your Blog but You shall be under no obligation to include or cover such topics.”
The terms also point out that termination of the contract with immediate effect could only occur “if the other party commits a material breach of any of its obligations under this Agreement which is not capable of remedy”; or if “the other party has committed a material breach of any of its obligations under this Agreement which is capable of remedy but which has not been remedied within a period of thirty (30) days following receipt of written notice to do so.”
The problem is that I had committed no breach of any of my contractual obligations. On the contrary, The Guardian had breached its contractual obligation to me regarding my freedom to determine the contents of my blog, simply because it didn’t like what I wrote. This is censorship.
As the Index on Censorship points out, the “absence of direct state-sponsored, highly visible censorship, which prevails in many countries around the world, may contribute to the commonly held view that there is no censorship in this country and that it is not a problem.” However, “contemporary UK censorship, which sits within a liberal democracy” can come “in many different forms, both direct and indirect, some more subtle, some more overt.”
Invisible barriers
Ironically, a few days later, I was contacted by the editor of The Ecologist — one of the world’s premier environment magazines — who wanted to re-print my Gaza gas story. After publishing an updated version of my Guardian piece, The Ecologist also published my in-depth follow up in response to objections printed in The National Interest (ironically authored by a contractor working for a US oil company invested in offshore gas reserves overlapping the Gaza Marine). Obviously, having been expelled by The Guardian, I could not respond via my blog as I would normally have done.
That follow-up drew on a range of public record sources including leading business and financial publications, as well as official British Foreign Office (FCO) documents obtained under Freedom of Information. The latter confirmed that despite massive domestic gas discoveries in Israel’s own territorial waters, the inability to kick-start production due to a host of bureaucratic, technological, logistical and regulatory issues — not to mention real uncertainties in quantities of commercially exploitable resources — meant that Israel could face gas supply challenges as early as next year. Israel’s own gas fields would probably not be brought into production until around 2018-2020. Israeli officials, according to the FCO, saw the 1.4 trillion cubic meters of gas in Gaza’s Marine (along with other potential “additional resources” as yet to be discovered according to the US Energy Information Administration) as a cheap “stop-gap” that might sustain both Israel’s domestic energy needs and its export ambitions until the Tamar and Leviathan fields could actually start producing.
By broaching such issues in The Guardian, though, it seems I had crossed some sort of invisible barrier — that this topic was simply off-limits.
Energy is part of the environment, wait, no it isn’t, not in Palestine anyway
To illustrate the sheer absurdity of The Guardian’s pretense that a story about Gaza’s gas resources is “not a legitimate environment story,” consider the fact that just weeks earlier, Adam Vaughan, the editor of the Guardian’s environment website, had personally assented to my posting the following story: ‘Iraq blowback: Isis rise manufactured by insatiable oil addiction — West’s co-optation of Gulf states’ jihadists created the neocon’s best friend: an Islamist Frankenstein.’
Proposed headlines for stories that environment bloggers work on are posted on a shared Google spreadsheet so that editors can keep track of what we’re doing and planning to publish. Adam had seen my proposed headline and requested to see the draft on the 16th June: “… would you mind sending this one by me on preview, please, before publishing? Just conscious it’s very sensitive subject,” he wrote in an email.
I sent him the full article with a summary of what it was about. Later in the day, I pinged him again to find out what he thought, and he replied: “thanks, sorry, yes — I think it’s fine.”
So an article about ISIS and oil addiction is “fine,” but a piece about Israel, Gaza and conflict over gas resources is not. Really? Are offshore gas resources not part of the environment? Apparently, for The Guardian, not in Palestine, where Gaza’s environment has been bombed to smithereens by the IDF.
The Blair factor
Meanwhile, the Israel-Gaza gas saga continues. Just over a week ago, Ha’aretz carried some insightful updates on the strategic value of the whole thing. Quoting Ariel Ezrahi, energy adviser to Quartet Middle East envoy Tony Blair (the Quartet representing the US, UN, EU and Russia), Ha’aretz noted that there was a reason why Jordan — which had recently signed an agreement with Israel to purchase gas from its Leviathan field — had simultaneously announced that it intended to purchase gas from Gaza. As Israel attempts to reposition itself as a major gas exporter to regional regimes like Egypt and Turkey, the biggest challenge is that “it’s very hard for them to sign a gas contract with Israel despite their desperate need,” due to how unpopular such a move would be with their domestic populations.
“If I were Israel’s prime minister,” Blair’s energy adviser said, “I’d think how I could help the neighboring countries extricate themselves from the jam, and if Israel closes the Palestinian gas market, that’s not a smart thing.” So Israel has to find a way to open the Palestinian gas market and integrate it into the emerging complex of Israeli export deals: “… it would be wise for Israel to at least consider the contribution of the Palestinian dimension to these deals,” said Ezrahi. “I think it’s a mistake for Israel to rush into regional agreements without at least considering the Palestinian dimension and how it can contribute to Israeli interests.”
Israel, backed by its allies in the west, wants to use the Palestinians “as an asset as they strive to join the regional power grid, and as a bridge to the Arab world,” by selling Palestinian “gas to various markets,” or promoting a deal with the corporations developing Israel’s “Tamar and Leviathan [fields] that will allow for the sale of cheap gas to the [Palestinian] Authority.”
But there is a further challenge when considering the Palestinian dimension, namely Hamas: “I can’t meet with people linked to Hamas,” said Blair’s energy adviser. “It’s a very firm ban dictated by the Quartet. [emphasis added] The Americans don’t enter Gaza either.” So it is not just Israel that has ruled out any gas deal with the Palestinians involving Hamas. So have the US, EU, UN and Russia.
But Israel has no mechanism to eliminate Hamas from the Gaza strip — except, as far as Moshe Ya’alon is concerned, military action to change facts on the ground.
Over the 70 odd articles I’d written for The Guardian, not a single piece falls outside the subject matter I had been commissioned to write on: the geopolitics of interconnected environment, energy and economic crises. The conclusion is unavoidable: The Guardian had simply decided that resource conflicts over the Occupied Territories should not receive coverage. It should be noted that before my post, the paper had never before acknowledged a link between IDF military action and Gaza’s gas. Now that I’m gone, I doubt it will ever be covered again.
Well, at least Ya’alon, and his boss Netanyahu, will be happy.
Not to mention Tony Blair.
Liberal gatekeeping
When I began speaking in confidence to a number of other journalists inside and outside The Guardian about what had happened to me, they all consistently told me that my experience — although particularly outrageous — was not entirely unprecedented.
A senior editor of a national British publication who has written frequently for The Guardian’s opinion section, told me that he was aware that all coverage of the Israel-Palestine issue was “tightly controlled” by Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian’s executive editor for opinion.
Another journalist told me that a Guardian editor commissioned a story from him discussing the suppression of criticism of Israel in public discourse and media, but that Freedland rejected the story without even reviewing a draft.
Several other journalists I spoke to inside and outside The Guardian went so far as to describe Freedland as the newspaper’s unofficial ‘gatekeeper’ on the Middle east conflict, and that he invariably leaned toward a pro-Israel slant.
These anecdotes have been publicly corroborated by Jonathan Cook, a former Middle East staff reporter, foreign editor and columnist for The Guardian, who is currently based in Nazareth where he has won several awards for his reporting. A profile of Cook at the progressive Jewish news site Mondoweiss points out that a key turning point in Cook’s career occurred in 2001 when he had just returned from Israel, having conducted an investigation into the murder of 13 non-violent Arab protestors by Israeli police during the second intifada the year before.
The police, Cook found, had executed a “shoot-to-kill policy” against unarmed victims — as was eventually confirmed by a government inquiry. But The Guardian suppressed his investigation, and chose not to run it at all. Cook says that while the paper does contain some exemplary reporting and insights, and even goes out of its way to condemn the occupation, there are certain lines that simply cannot be crossed, such as questioning Israel’s capacity to define itself as simultaneously an exclusively Jewish and democratic state, or critiquing aspects of its security doctrine.
Cook’s scathing criticism of his former paper in a 2011 Counterpunch article is highly revealing, and relevant, for understanding what happened to me:
“The Guardian, like other mainstream media, is heavily invested — both financially and ideologically — in supporting the current global order. It was once able to exclude and now, in the internet age, must vilify those elements of the left whose ideas risk questioning a system of corporate power and control of which the Guardian is a key institution.
The paper’s role, like that of its rightwing cousins, is to limit the imaginative horizons of readers. While there is just enough leftwing debate to make readers believe their paper is pluralistic, the kind of radical perspectives needed to question the very foundations on which the system of Western dominance rests is either unavailable or is ridiculed.”
Last month, Cook highlighted ongoing subtle but powerful insensitivities of language employed by The Guardian coverage’s of the Gaza crisis which, in effect, served to “disappear” the Palestinians. He specifically identified Freedland as a major player in this phenomenon. “The Guardian’s pride” in having helped create Israel is “still palpable at the paper (as I know from my years there),” especially among certain senior editors there “who influence much of the conflict’s coverage — yes, that is a reference to Jonathan Freedland, among others.”
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UPDATE 4th Dec 2014 (10.13AM): Jonathan Freedland has offered a response this morning via TwitLonger, as follows:
“Your piece for Medium implies I was involved in the end of your arrangement with the Guardian. I don’t wish to be rude, but I had literally not heard of you or your work till seeing that Medium piece, via Twitter, a few hours ago. (The Guardian environment website, where you wrote, is edited separately from the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, which I now oversee.) I had no idea you wrote for the Guardian, no idea that arrangement had been terminated and not the slightest knowledge of your piece on Gaza’s gas until a few hours ago. What’s more, I was abroad — on vacation — on the days in July you describe. To put it starkly, my involvement in your case was precisely zero. I hope that as a matter of your own journalistic integrity, you’ll want to alter the Medium piece to reflect these facts. Perhaps you’ll also share this on Twitter as widely as you shared the Medium piece yesterday.”
However, Freedland’s reading of this piece is incorrect. I am not implying that Freedland was “involved” in the end of my Guardian tenure. I have no clue about that, and to be sure, I did not make any such claim above.
My simple point is that my experience of egregious Guardian censorship over the Gaza gas story — which Freedland does not address beyond denying his involvement — has a long and little-known context, suggesting that rather than my experience being a mere bizarre and accidental aberration, it is part of an entrenched, wider culture across the paper of which Freedland himself has allegedly played a key role in fostering.
It is not my fault that the range of journalists I spoke to all described Freedland as the Guardian’s resident unofficial “gatekeeper” on Israel-Palestine coverage. Notably, Freedland fails to address their allegations that he has previously quashed stories which are critical of Israel on ideological grounds rather than reasons of ‘journalistic integrity.’
END
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This is perhaps not entirely surprising. A book commissioned by The Guardian, Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel, by Daphna Baram, documents clearly the connection between the newspaper and Zionism, noting for instance that Guardian editor CP Scott had been central to the negotiations with the British government resulting in the Balfour Declaration and the very conception of the state of Israel. Her conclusion is that despite becoming increasingly critical of the occupation after 1967, The Guardian remains staunchly pro-Zionist, its staff devoting “inordinate time and effort” to ensure “fairness to Israel.”
Toward a media revolution
The Guardian, quite rightly, has a reputation for breaking some of the most important news stories of the decade — among them, of course, playing a lead role in releasing Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance and related violations of civil liberties. Yet hidden in the cracks of this coverage is the fact that while disclosing critical facts, The Guardian has been unable to raise the most fundamental and probing questions about the purpose and direction of mass surveillance, why it has accelerated, what motivates it, and who benefits from it.
Questions must therefore be asked as to why a newspaper that sees itself as the global media’s bastion of liberalism, has engaged in such grievous censorship by shutting down coverage of environmental geopolitics — a phenomenon which is increasingly at the heart not just of conflict over the Occupied Territories, but of the chaos of world affairs in the 21st century.
If this is the state of The Guardian, undoubtedly one of the better newspapers, then clearly we have a serious problem with the media. Ultimately, mainstream media remains under the undue influence of powerful special interests, whether financial, corporate or ideological.
Given the scale of the converging crises we face in terms of climate change, energy volatility, financial crisis, rampant inequality, proliferating species extinctions, insane ocean acidification, food crisis, foreign policy militarism, and the rise of the police-state — and given the bankruptcy of much of the media in illuminating the real causes of these crises and their potential solutions, we need new reliable and accountable sources of news and information.
We need new media, and we need it now.
As print newspapers go increasingly into decline, the opportunity for new people-powered models of independent digital media is rising exponentially. That’s why I’ve launched a crowdfunder to help support my journalism, and to move toward creating a new investigative journalism collective that operates in the public interest, precisely because it is funded not by corporations or ideologues, but by people. If we can create new journalism platforms that are dependent for their survival on citizens themselves, then it is in the interests of citizens that those platforms will function. Until then, fearless, adversarial investigative journalism will always be in danger of being shut down or compromised.
I believe that together, we can create a new people-powered model of journalism that will make the old, hierarchical media conglomerates dominated by special interests and parochial paternalistic visions of the world obsolete. So, if you like, pop along to my Patreon.com crowdfunder for INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a truly independent people-powered investigative journalism collective that will remain dedicated to breaking the big stories that matter, no matter what. Pledge as little or as much as you like, and join the coming media revolution☺
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. Formerly of The Guardian, he writes the ‘System Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books.
MISFIRE: The Burning of Captured Jordanian Pilot, Staged Propaganda & Coalition Airstrikes
February 8, 2015 By 21 Comments
Shawn Helton21st Century Wire
We’ve been told that Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh has been burned alive by members of ISIS. However, upon closer review, the latest heavily produced ISIS ‘death scene’ is once again tailor-made for Western audiences – revealing a carefully engineered narrative in its wake…The apparent burning of captured Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh should be treated with suspicion, as his death has all the signs of being a choreographed event. Along with other high-profile ISIS killings, the ‘fiery death’ of Kasasbeh, appeared to depict a very stylized affair, one with multiple camera angles, modern Hollywood-like editing, all packaged in a gripping social media campaign, complete with ISIS members being clothed in pristine military-issued outfits, holding weapons that look as though they’re props and have never been fired.
As this report progresses we’ll discuss some of the most telling aspects surrounding the newly emerged ISIS firebrand…
IMAGE – ‘Captured’ - Moaz al-Kasasbeh after his alleged plane crash, is said to have been nabbed by ISIS militants. Notice that Kasasbeh appears to be in good condition healthwise, walking away from a crash site, as ISIS members gather in clean wardrobe outfits for another staged photo op. Have authorities been able to identify those actors who are unmasked in this photograph? ( Photo link ibtimes.co.uk)Falling into the hands of ISIS
While on an airstrike mission on December 24th, Moaz al-Kasasbeh apparently crashed his plane in the city of Raqqa, Syria, after conflicting reports as to how his plane was downed.
The Jordanian pilot is said to have met his end due to a failed swap of Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, who was convicted in the suicide bombing of Amman in 2005. The apparent jihadist al-rishawi along with one other were killed by Jordan in retaliation for the burned pilot.
Kasasbeh was held captive by ISIS militants before being allegedly burned alive on January 3rd, exactly one month later news of Kasasbeh’s ‘death by fire’ was released through social media channels. Kasasbeh’s tale is a harrowing one for sure – but a story which could be used to disguise the culpability of the US government in the rise of masked Sunni extremists and in particular, the clandestine training facilities said to be located in Turkey and Jordan that have ties to ISIS.
Here are still images depicting Moaz al-Kasasbeh’s much propagandized and overly produced burning video…
IMAGE: ‘Death Awaits’ Jordanian pilot Kasasbeh stands in front of members ISIS, in what appears to be a staged scene. Notice the shadowing of the picture plane from front to back, does this indicate post production. (counterjihadnews.com)
IMAGE: ‘Caged Pilot’ – Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh allegedly held in captivity by ISIS, before supposedly being engulfed in flames. SITE intelligence gives this latest ISIS ‘terror act’ their seal of authenticity. (Photo link india.com.)
IMAGE: ‘New Angle, Same Story’ – Here’s a different camera angle of the Jordanian pilot supposedly being burned alive. Notice the Site Intelligence Group logo in the upper right portion of this still image – always there to distribute new terror messages. (Photo link nydailynews.com)
IMAGE: ‘Trick of the Eye’ - Kasasbeh appears to accept his horrific fate – was he really burned alive? (Photo link buzzpo.com)
IMAGE: ‘Another Angle’ – The fire seems to surround Kasasbeh in this image. Notice the staged ISIS militants in the background. ( Photo link foxnews.com)Beheadings, burnings & extortionThere was a very real shift pull public perception over countries dealing with the new ISIS firebrand.
Once again the timing and predictable reaction regarding the seemingly inconclusive fire based video appears to fall in line with other botched beheading’s by ISIS – continuing the designer terror threat for a larger Western agenda.
According to reports, a 22-minute video depicted Kasasbeh walking at gunpoint into cage, at which point was set on fire once inside the cage via powdered explosive. As with nearly all ISIS videos, this latest video was pulled from social media platforms in under 24 hours, just long enough for a specific message to sink in, so as to avoid scrutiny over the highly produced video. Jihadi John, the masked militant seen in six videos before, was absent from this latest video.
The video was a flashy quick edit MTV-style production titled “Healing of the Believers’ Chests,” which was said to have been released through social media on February 3rd. However, it was revealed that Kasasbeh was killed on January 3rd – something which will prove to be a bit of a quandary for authorities and SITE, as they try to explain how this was already known for a month. Media outlets have sprung into action glossing over the timeline as a significant detail.
Over the fall experts examined the alleged brutal beheading’s of both James Foley and Steven Sotloff which were believed to be have shown elements of camera trickery and post-production.
It’s worth taking another look at an unnamed forensic company’s analysis, with regards to Foley’s apparent beheading in early September:In a news release from the UK’s Telegraph, writer Bill Gardner, remarked on the peculiar Islamic State video that allegedly featured Foley’s death:
“Forensic analysis of the footage of the journalist’s death has suggested that the British jihadist in the film may have been the frontman rather than the killer.
The clip, which apparently depicts Mr Foley’s brutal beheading, has been widely seen as a propaganda coup for Islamic State miltant group.
But a study of the four-minute 40-second clip, carried out by an international forensic science company which has worked for police forces across Britain, suggested camera trickery and slick post-production techniques appear to have been used.”
“After enhancements, the knife can be seen to be drawn across the upper neck at least six times, with no blood evidence to the point the picture fades to black.”
“After enhancements, the knife can be seen to be drawn across the upper neck at least six times, with no blood evidence to the point the picture fades to black.”
In a report from Fox news in part compiled by correspondent Catherine Herridge, who regularly dispenses information from the Pentagon, Western foreign policy objectives are made clearer in the wake of recent ISIS related events:
“CIA and counter-terrorism analysts noted the tape follows a pattern familiar in ISIS clips. It features news clips of the Jordanian king with sound of coalition strikes and ground operations. Sources told Fox News it demonstrated the highest production values of any tape to date, suggesting it took considerable time to shoot and produce.”
“Release of the video follows days of intense protests by Jordanians outside King Abdullah’s palace over the government’s refusal to agree on a prisoner swap with the terror group. Many Jordanians as well as the pilot’s family are faulting Amman – not ISIS – for allowing their country to be drawn into a “war” they claim is one between the Islamic State and the U.S. and its allies. Demonstrators outside the gates of the royal palace have cried out, “Abdullah, why are we fighting?” while other Jordanian protesters have taken to social media, creating an Arabic hashtag on Twitter that reads #NotOurWar.”
“The horrific footage surfaced just a day after top Islamic State leaders warned against social media disclosures of the terror army’s activities that were not sanctioned by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi or the group’s spokesman, Mohammad al-Adnani. It also came just hours after Secretary of State John Kerry met with King Abdullah and Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh in Washington.”
The report may have unintentionally disclosed that many Jordanian’s are not in support of the West’s fraudulent war-theater in Iraq and Syria, and that some of these new ISIS events may not be sanctioned by there own proclaimed terror leaders. This then begs the question: who is releasing material on behalf of the group, if it is not sanctioned by the ISIS leadership?
There are so many unanswered forensic questions surrounding the ISIS executions, and even a basic assessment of an alleged death has yet to be proven forensically.
IMAGE: Japanese journalist Kenji Goto holding a picture of caged Jordanian pilot Kasasbeh. The photograph Goto is holding looks to be a still image from the 22 minute video just released – putting the timeline of events into question. ( Photo link cloudfront.net)Training terror in secretIn March of 2013, Germany’s Der Spiegel, along with Britain’s Guardian outlet, revealed that the “US had been training Syrian anti-government fighters in Jordan,” while receiving additional support from other Western allies, including their valued partners within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). In addition to the typical Western cohorts getting in on the act, it was revealed that Jordan was also culpable, as Jordanian intelligence services were said to be involved in the program, aimed to build, “a dozen units totaling some 10,000 fighters,” within the FSA facility in Jordan.
The Spiegel report also stated that the US Defense Department declined to comment, along with the French foreign ministry and Britain’s foreign and defense ministries.
In 2012, at the height of the ‘chemical weapons’ allegations swiriling in Syria, a chain of events was revealed that exposed the connection between FSA rebels, ISIS and the Turkish guided rebel paramilitary group Front Victory.
Front Victory had experience using chlorine as a chemical weapon and many of the groups founders came out of ISIS – who were first installed in Syria in 2011. As we’ve covered before here at 21WIRE, human rights investigator Nizar Nayouf via SyriaTruth.org, revealed that Jordanian intelligence services had a much greater role in the in the growth of the ISIS.The following was translated from Arabic to English:
“Jordanian intelligence proceeded to facilitate the smuggling of chlorine gas from Jordan to the organization known as “Islamic State of Iraq”, the first to use chlorine gas technology (with the help of Jordanian Intelligence and Saudi Arabia) as a “chemical weapon” – a taboo issue in the media in the context of covering genocide”
“Given the fact that the “first generation” and “second generation” of the founders and staff of “Front Victory” hailed originally out of the “Islamic State of Iraq” organisation, they were the only ones among the insurgent Syrians who are schooled in this technique. In addition, the organization “Islamic State of Iraq” deliberately to be the first installments of his gunmen who were sent to Syria as of fall 2011.”
IMAGE: ‘Propaganda Pusher’ – Terrorism analyst Rita Katz founded the Bethesda, Maryland based for-profit SITE Intelligence Group. (Photo link hpub.org)SITE arrives on the scene again
In 2002, Rita Katz and Josh Devon founded Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute, which eventually developed into its current incarnation, as a propaganda outlet for high-profile terror groups.
The terror monitoring group SITE, is something we’ve discussed ad nauseam here at 21WIRE, as the intelligence group is directly linked to both the CIA and Israeli intelligence. In 2006, SITE discussed how they procure various terror plots and terror videos by joining jihadist message boards, as reported in a New Yorker article entitled, “Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business”:
In 2002, Rita Katz and Josh Devon founded Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute, which eventually developed into its current incarnation, as a propaganda outlet for high-profile terror groups.
The terror monitoring group SITE, is something we’ve discussed ad nauseam here at 21WIRE, as the intelligence group is directly linked to both the CIA and Israeli intelligence. In 2006, SITE discussed how they procure various terror plots and terror videos by joining jihadist message boards, as reported in a New Yorker article entitled, “Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business”:
“Katz has a testy relationship with the government, sometimes acting as a consultant and sometimes as an antagonist. About a year ago, a SITE staffer, under an alias, managed to join an exclusive jihadist message board that, among other things, served as a debarkation point for many would-be suicide bombers. For months, the staffer pretended to be one of the jihadis, joining in chats and watching as other members posted the chilling messages known as “wills,” the final sign-offs before martyrdom. The staffer also passed along technical advice on how to keep the message board going.
“Eventually, he won the confidence of the site’s Webmasters, who were impressed with his computer skills, and he gained access to the true e-mail addresses of the members and other information about them. After monitoring the site for several more days, the staffer told Katz that one of the site’s members, a young Muslim man in a European country, had just posted a will. “It was obvious that he was planning to become a martyr very soon,” Katz said.”
“Katz called officials in Washington, and was met with institutional resistance: “They said, ‘Oh, Rita, I’m not sure you should even be communicating with them—you might be providing material support!’”
How does SITE avoid any potential charges related to their organization, given that they admit to providing advice to those plotting attacks?Perhaps there is a better explanation.
Here’s another look at a CNN interview with SITE founder and Israeli operative, Rita Katz, who admits, “we had that video beforehand and were able to beat them with the release”. Notice how the intelligence group founder Katz, conveniently and calmly discusses acquiring the ISIS videos by claiming that the terror group needs a place to disseminate its exploits:“Eventually, he won the confidence of the site’s Webmasters, who were impressed with his computer skills, and he gained access to the true e-mail addresses of the members and other information about them. After monitoring the site for several more days, the staffer told Katz that one of the site’s members, a young Muslim man in a European country, had just posted a will. “It was obvious that he was planning to become a martyr very soon,” Katz said.”
“Katz called officials in Washington, and was met with institutional resistance: “They said, ‘Oh, Rita, I’m not sure you should even be communicating with them—you might be providing material support!’”
How does SITE avoid any potential charges related to their organization, given that they admit to providing advice to those plotting attacks?Perhaps there is a better explanation.
Why would ISIS care to go through the intelligence group, when they could just as easily upload videos to a plethora of other social media platforms on their own?
Additionally, if SITE knows the alleged location where ‘terror videos’ are being uploaded as stated by Katz in the CNN interview above, why wouldn’t the US government be able to track and find those involved in producing such terror?
As we’ve acknowledged before, SITE and it’s ‘sister organization’ at Intel Center, have both been repeatedly accused of (and caught) distributing completely fake al Qaeda videos,
The apparent ISIS ‘executions’ have been used by Western media to sway public opinion, preemptively prepping the public for future western-backed war theater. Site appears to have garnered exclusive ‘publishing rights’ to the video deeds of various terror puppets like al Qaeda, Boko Haram, al Shabaab, and now ISIS.
IMAGE: ‘Death from Above?’ – Kayla Jean Mueller had been working in Turkey and Syria before allegedly being held captive by ISIS. ( Photo link usatoday.com)
Jordan’s retaliation & an American aid workerAfter Jordanian authorities quickly moved to execute several purported militants in retaliation, like clockwork an airstrike campaign quickly ensued.
A 26-year-old American aid worker Kayla Jean Mueller of Prescott, Arizona, was allegedly taken hostage by ISIS, while working with Doctors Without Borders in August of 2013. Her identity was heavily guarded until recently.
In addition, aid worker Mueller, was said to have worked with humanitarian aid groups in Darfur, Sudan, Northern India, Israel and Palestine. Given the fact the that many aid groups have been connected to intelligence operations, we have to consider that to be possibility in Mueller’s case as well.
According to a recent news release from the LA Times, “the plight of families fleeing the violence in Syria drew her (Kayla Mueller) to neighboring Turkey in December 2012. She worked with the aid groups Support to Life and the Danish Refugee Council.”
US authorities have been scrambling to determine if the young aid worker was killed from airstrikes directed by Jordan, following the apparent execution of Kasasbeh.
According to SITE Intelligence Group, ISIS disclosed that the death of Mueller was caused by the Jordanian airstrike campaign via a social media account on Twitter.
According to USA TODAY Jordanian Interior Minister Hussein Majali stated that:
“They tried to cause problems internally in Jordan and haven’t succeeded.” Then adding that:
“They are now trying to drive a wedge between the coalition with this latest low PR stunt.”
According to USA TODAY:
“Jordan’s military has a high level of confidence that the hostage was not killed by a Jordanian airstrike, a Jordanian government official told USA TODAY. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official is not authorized to speak publicly on the issue, did not elaborate on how the military drew that conclusion.“
“Mueller’s identity had not been previously released by American officials or her family out of fear for her safety. She is the last known remaining American hostage held by the group.”
The timing of the Jordanian pilot incident and the apparent airstrikes which followed seemed to be choreographed with that of Jordanian King Abdullah’s visit to the White House.
Reuters announced yesterday that Jordan has carried out 3rd day of air strikes, as a US-led coalition has conducted 11 air strikes in Syria and 15 in Iraq over the past 24 hours.
How much longer can those in Washington and SITE continue the ISIS charade before there is a mass public awakening to the decidedly Western propaganda?
Look for several other possible plots against Jordanian pilots and a British journalist said to be captured by ISIS in the coming days and weeks.
How much longer can those in Washington and SITE continue the ISIS charade before there is a mass public awakening to the decidedly Western propaganda?
Look for several other possible plots against Jordanian pilots and a British journalist said to be captured by ISIS in the coming days and weeks.
More details to come as the ISIS saga continues…
READ MORE ISIS NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire ISIS Files
The Terror We Give Is the Terror We Get
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_terror_we_give_is_the_terror_we_get_20150208/
Posted on Feb 8, 2015
By Chris Hedges
We fire missiles from the sky that incinerate families huddled in their houses. They incinerate a pilot cowering in a cage. We torture hostages in our black sites and choke them to death by stuffing rags down their throats. They torture hostages in squalid hovels and behead them. We organize Shiite death squads to kill Sunnis. They organize Sunni death squads to kill Shiites. We produce high-budget films such as “American Sniper” to glorify our war crimes. They produce inspirational videos to glorify their twisted version of jihad.
The barbarism we condemn is the barbarism we commit. The line that separates us from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is technological, not moral. We are those we fight.
“From violence, only violence is born,” Primo Levi wrote, “following a pendular action that, as time goes by, rather than dying down, becomes more frenzied.”
The burning of the pilot, Jordanian Lt. Muath Al-Kaseasbeh, by ISIS militants after his F-16 crashed near Raqqa, Syria, was as gruesome as anything devised for the Roman amphitheater. And it was meant to be. Death is the primary spectacle of war. If ISIS had fighter jets, missiles, drones and heavy artillery to bomb American cities there would be no need to light a captured pilot on fire; ISIS would be able to burn human beings, as we do, from several thousand feet up. But since ISIS is limited in its capacity for war it must broadcast to the world a miniature version of what we do to people in the Middle East. The ISIS process is cruder. The result is the same.
Terror is choreographed. Remember “Shock and Awe”? Terror must be seen and felt to be effective. Terror demands gruesome images. Terror must instill a paralyzing fear. Terror requires the agony of families. It requires mutilated corpses. It requires anguished appeals from helpless hostages and prisoners. Terror is a message sent back and forth in the twisted dialogue of war. Terror creates a whirlwind of rage, horror, shame, pain, disgust, pity, frustration and impotence. It consumes civilians and combatants. It elevates violence as the highest virtue, justified in the name of noble ideals. It unleashes a carnival of death and plunges a society into blood-drenched madness.
During the Bosnian War of the 1990s, relatives paid enormous sums to retrieve the bodies of their sons or husbands being held by corpse traders on the opposing side. And they paid even more in attempts to secure the release of sons or husbands when they were alive. Such trades are as old as war itself. Human beings, whether in our black sites or in the hands of Islamic militants, are war’s collateral.
Not all hostages or prisoners evoke the same national outcry. Not all command the same price. And not all are slated for release. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which turned kidnapping and ransom negotiations into an efficient business and took hundreds of captives, held tiers of hostages. Celebrity hostages—including politician Ingrid Betancourt, who was captured while she was running for the presidency of Colombia and who was freed by the Colombian military after being held six years—were essentially priced out of the market. FARC also had middle-priced hostages such as police officers and soldiers and low-priced hostages who included peasants. Celebrity hostages are worth more to all sides of a conflict while they are in captivity. These celebrity hostages—onetime Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped and executed by the Red Brigades in 1978, is another example—heighten war’s drama. Saddam Hussein in a cage served this purpose. Celebrity hostages, because the price demanded for their release is so extravagant, are often condemned to death in advance. I suspect this was the case with the American journalist James Foley, who was beheaded in captivity. The proposed ransom was so wildly exorbitant—100 million euros and the release of Islamic radicals being held by the United States—that his captors probably never expected it to be paid.
The Jordanian government is struggling to contain a virulent, if small radical Islamic movement. There is unease among Jordan’s population, as there is unease in the United States about American air assaults on ISIS. The death of the Jordanian pilot, however, bolsters the claims by Washington and Amman that the battle with ISIS is a struggle between democratic, enlightened states (although Jordan is not a democracy) and savage jihadists. And Jordan’s hanging of two al-Qaida members Wednesday was calculated, along with Jordanian fighter jet strikes in Syria on the de facto capital of ISIS, to highlight these supposed differences and intensify the conflict.
Sajida al-Rishawi, one of the two who were hanged, had been on death row since 2005 for her role in the attacks on Amman hotels that left 60 people dead. She had been an associate of the Jordanian-born al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in Iraq in 2006. The tit-for-tat executions by Jordan and ISIS, like the airstrikes, are useful in playing the game of terror versus terror. It fosters the binary vision of a battle between good and evil that is crucial to maintaining the fevered pitch of war. You do not want your enemy to appear human. You do not want to let your population tire of the bloodletting. You must always manufacture terror and fear.
France and most other European states, unlike the United States, negotiate with kidnappers and pay for hostages. This has devolved into an established business practice. The tens of millions of dollars raised by ISIS through kidnapping is a significant source of its revenue, amounting to perhaps as much as half of its operating budget. The New York Times, in an investigation, wrote in July 2014 that “Al Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken in at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008, of which $66 million was paid just last year.” But negotiating and paying ransoms has consequences. While French and other European citizens are more likely to be ransomed, they are also more likely to be taken hostage. But France is spared the scenes that Americans, who refuse to pay, must endure. And because of this France is able to remain relatively sane.
Terror serves the interests of the war mongers on both sides of the divide. This is what happened during the 444-day Iran hostage crisis that took place from 1979 to 1981. And this is why Jordan—unlike Japan, which saw two of its nationals executed but is not involved militarily against ISIS—has reacted with sanctimonious fury and carried out retaliation. It is why Foley’s murder strengthened the call by the war lobby in Washington to launch a bombing campaign against ISIS. Terror—the terror we commit and the terror done to us—feeds the lusts for war. It is a recruiting tool for war’s crusade. If ISIS were not brutal it would have to be made to seem brutal. It is the luck of the fanatics we oppose, and the fanatics in our midst, that everyone’s propaganda needs are amply met. The tragedy is that so many innocents suffer.
Mideast governments allied with the West, including Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, have watched in horror as ISIS has carved out of parts of Syria and Iraq to create a self-declared caliphate the size of Texas. ISIS has managed through oil exports and the business of hostage taking to become financially self-sufficient. The area under its control has become a mecca for jihadists. It has attracted an estimated 12,000 foreign fighters, including 2,000 from Europe.
The longer the rogue caliphate remains in existence the more it becomes a mortal threat to the West’s allies in the region. ISIS will not invade countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but its continued existence empowers the discontented and the radicals in those countries, many groaning under collapsing economies, to stoke internal upheavals. The United States and its allies in the region are determined to erase ISIS from the map. It is too destabilizing. Dramas like these, because they serve the aims of ISIS as well as those of the nations seeking to destroy ISIS, will be played out as long as the caliphate exists.
Terror is the engine of war. And terror is what all sides in this conflict produce in overabundance.
A demonstrator carries a poster with a picture of slain Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh during an anti-ISIS rally in Amman, Jordan, on Friday. AP Photo/Nasser Nasser
The barbarism we condemn is the barbarism we commit. The line that separates us from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is technological, not moral. We are those we fight.
“From violence, only violence is born,” Primo Levi wrote, “following a pendular action that, as time goes by, rather than dying down, becomes more frenzied.”
The burning of the pilot, Jordanian Lt. Muath Al-Kaseasbeh, by ISIS militants after his F-16 crashed near Raqqa, Syria, was as gruesome as anything devised for the Roman amphitheater. And it was meant to be. Death is the primary spectacle of war. If ISIS had fighter jets, missiles, drones and heavy artillery to bomb American cities there would be no need to light a captured pilot on fire; ISIS would be able to burn human beings, as we do, from several thousand feet up. But since ISIS is limited in its capacity for war it must broadcast to the world a miniature version of what we do to people in the Middle East. The ISIS process is cruder. The result is the same.
Terror is choreographed. Remember “Shock and Awe”? Terror must be seen and felt to be effective. Terror demands gruesome images. Terror must instill a paralyzing fear. Terror requires the agony of families. It requires mutilated corpses. It requires anguished appeals from helpless hostages and prisoners. Terror is a message sent back and forth in the twisted dialogue of war. Terror creates a whirlwind of rage, horror, shame, pain, disgust, pity, frustration and impotence. It consumes civilians and combatants. It elevates violence as the highest virtue, justified in the name of noble ideals. It unleashes a carnival of death and plunges a society into blood-drenched madness.
During the Bosnian War of the 1990s, relatives paid enormous sums to retrieve the bodies of their sons or husbands being held by corpse traders on the opposing side. And they paid even more in attempts to secure the release of sons or husbands when they were alive. Such trades are as old as war itself. Human beings, whether in our black sites or in the hands of Islamic militants, are war’s collateral.
Not all hostages or prisoners evoke the same national outcry. Not all command the same price. And not all are slated for release. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which turned kidnapping and ransom negotiations into an efficient business and took hundreds of captives, held tiers of hostages. Celebrity hostages—including politician Ingrid Betancourt, who was captured while she was running for the presidency of Colombia and who was freed by the Colombian military after being held six years—were essentially priced out of the market. FARC also had middle-priced hostages such as police officers and soldiers and low-priced hostages who included peasants. Celebrity hostages are worth more to all sides of a conflict while they are in captivity. These celebrity hostages—onetime Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped and executed by the Red Brigades in 1978, is another example—heighten war’s drama. Saddam Hussein in a cage served this purpose. Celebrity hostages, because the price demanded for their release is so extravagant, are often condemned to death in advance. I suspect this was the case with the American journalist James Foley, who was beheaded in captivity. The proposed ransom was so wildly exorbitant—100 million euros and the release of Islamic radicals being held by the United States—that his captors probably never expected it to be paid.
The Jordanian government is struggling to contain a virulent, if small radical Islamic movement. There is unease among Jordan’s population, as there is unease in the United States about American air assaults on ISIS. The death of the Jordanian pilot, however, bolsters the claims by Washington and Amman that the battle with ISIS is a struggle between democratic, enlightened states (although Jordan is not a democracy) and savage jihadists. And Jordan’s hanging of two al-Qaida members Wednesday was calculated, along with Jordanian fighter jet strikes in Syria on the de facto capital of ISIS, to highlight these supposed differences and intensify the conflict.
Sajida al-Rishawi, one of the two who were hanged, had been on death row since 2005 for her role in the attacks on Amman hotels that left 60 people dead. She had been an associate of the Jordanian-born al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in Iraq in 2006. The tit-for-tat executions by Jordan and ISIS, like the airstrikes, are useful in playing the game of terror versus terror. It fosters the binary vision of a battle between good and evil that is crucial to maintaining the fevered pitch of war. You do not want your enemy to appear human. You do not want to let your population tire of the bloodletting. You must always manufacture terror and fear.
France and most other European states, unlike the United States, negotiate with kidnappers and pay for hostages. This has devolved into an established business practice. The tens of millions of dollars raised by ISIS through kidnapping is a significant source of its revenue, amounting to perhaps as much as half of its operating budget. The New York Times, in an investigation, wrote in July 2014 that “Al Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken in at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008, of which $66 million was paid just last year.” But negotiating and paying ransoms has consequences. While French and other European citizens are more likely to be ransomed, they are also more likely to be taken hostage. But France is spared the scenes that Americans, who refuse to pay, must endure. And because of this France is able to remain relatively sane.
Terror serves the interests of the war mongers on both sides of the divide. This is what happened during the 444-day Iran hostage crisis that took place from 1979 to 1981. And this is why Jordan—unlike Japan, which saw two of its nationals executed but is not involved militarily against ISIS—has reacted with sanctimonious fury and carried out retaliation. It is why Foley’s murder strengthened the call by the war lobby in Washington to launch a bombing campaign against ISIS. Terror—the terror we commit and the terror done to us—feeds the lusts for war. It is a recruiting tool for war’s crusade. If ISIS were not brutal it would have to be made to seem brutal. It is the luck of the fanatics we oppose, and the fanatics in our midst, that everyone’s propaganda needs are amply met. The tragedy is that so many innocents suffer.
Mideast governments allied with the West, including Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, have watched in horror as ISIS has carved out of parts of Syria and Iraq to create a self-declared caliphate the size of Texas. ISIS has managed through oil exports and the business of hostage taking to become financially self-sufficient. The area under its control has become a mecca for jihadists. It has attracted an estimated 12,000 foreign fighters, including 2,000 from Europe.
The longer the rogue caliphate remains in existence the more it becomes a mortal threat to the West’s allies in the region. ISIS will not invade countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but its continued existence empowers the discontented and the radicals in those countries, many groaning under collapsing economies, to stoke internal upheavals. The United States and its allies in the region are determined to erase ISIS from the map. It is too destabilizing. Dramas like these, because they serve the aims of ISIS as well as those of the nations seeking to destroy ISIS, will be played out as long as the caliphate exists.
Terror is the engine of war. And terror is what all sides in this conflict produce in overabundance.
NGUỒN TIN và THAM KHẢO
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-...
http://www.thenation.com/blog/173149/...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014...
http://i.imgur.com/3UClfnd.jpg
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2015...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/would-be-...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CntRG...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Uog...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Rm-...
https://www.youtube.com/user/wearecha...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/p...
==
http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/12/08...
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext....
http://news.antiwar.com/2014/12/08/ru...
http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2014/1...
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid...
https://www.google.com/search?q=polan...
https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/pales...
https://www.youtube.com/user/wearecha...
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