Arab Spring

You seem like the mirror image of the Chomskyites when you try to force events in countries all over the world to conform to your predetermined theories about the Cathedral based on extremely limited evidence or even no evidence until proven otherwise. Everything I said is well known by people familiar with the situation in Syria.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10585391/Syrias-Assad-accused-of-boosting-al-Qaeda-with-secret-oil-deals.html

Intelligence gathered by Western secret services suggested the regime began collaborating actively with these groups again in the spring of 2013. When Jabhat al-Nusra seized control of Syria’s most lucrative oil fields in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, it began funding its operations in Syria by selling crude oil, with sums raised in the millions of dollars.

Aron Lund, editor of a website, Syria in Crisis, used by the Carnegie Endowment to monitor the war, said: “The regime has done a good job in trying to turn the revolution Islamist. The releases from Sednaya prison are a good example of this. The regime claims that it released the prisoners because Assad had shortened their sentences as part of a general amnesty. But it seems to have gone beyond that. There are no random acts of kindness from this regime.”

Rebels both inside and outside ISIS also say they believe the regime targeted its attacks on non-militant groups, leaving ISIS alone. “We were confident that the regime would not bomb us,” an ISIS defector, who called himself Murad, said. “We always slept soundly in our bases.”

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/551852-blame-assad-first-for-isis-rise

Indeed, presumably realizing (or being told by “brotherly” Iran) after the fall of Iraq’s Mosul last week that ISIS had been allowed to grow stronger than intended, on Sunday Assad’s air force began bombing the group’s strongholds across northeastern Syria.

But that, if anything, only underlines the point that the regime knew the locations of those strongholds all this time.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9400537/Exclusive-interview-why-I-defected-from-Bashar-al-Assads-regime-by-former-diplomat-Nawaf-Fares.html

Nawaf Fares, a former regime hardliner and security chief who was Syria’s ambassador to Iraq, spoke out in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph yesterday…Mr Fares’s most damaging allegation is that the Syrian government itself has a hand in the nationwide wave of suicide bombings on government buildings, which have killed hundreds of people and maimed thousands more. By way of example, he cited the twin blasts outside a military intelligence building in the al-Qazzaz suburb of Damascus in May, which killed 55 people and injured another 370.
“I know for certain that not a single serving intelligence official was harmed during that explosion, as the whole office had been evacuated 15 minutes beforehand,” he said. “All the victims were passers by instead. All these major explosions have been have been perpetrated by al-Qaeda through cooperation with the security forces.”

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Obama in the Cabinet Room in September 2013. Of Arms and MANPADS…
April 4, 2014
Hook, line, and sinker
Blame Assad first for ISIS’ rise

MICHAEL WEISS
Published: 23/01/2014 03:58 PM | Updated: 25/01/2014 05:00 PM
AAA
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Assad’s hypocrisy – and America’s
Both Assad and Obama’s claims about Al-Qaeda in Syria do not match up with their actions

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
Watching the opening ceremonies of the so-called Geneva II conference in Montreux this week – a conference that has been all but declared dead before arrival – one can’t help but experience a profound depression at how a regime such as Bashar al-Assad’s has managed to outwit and outmaneuver even the languid efforts of the United States. This is quite clearly a Manson family cult masquerading as a national government, and its continued existence is extraordinary considering what it’s been up to in the past 40 years and how pathetically it’s evaded justice for the last gruesome three.

Yet an explanation for its longevity has begun to emerge. The White House claims that its Iran policy is safely compartmentalized from its Syria policy. But its actions betray its press releases, as do the president’s own thought-experiments in unguarded moments.

Here he is in dialogue with the New Yorker’s David Remnick: “[A]lthough it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion – not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon – you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”

Thus do grand visions articulate themselves, and thus did the Obama administration recently suffer a decision-making crisis about whether or not to invite a would-be responsible country, which has subsidized and supplanted much of Assad’s atrocity-making abilities, to a conference all about “peace.” Would Iran accede to a two-year-old program for “transitional” government in Damascus? Nope. Would the Syrian National Coalition, a body that had to be cajoled and threatened into attending Geneva II in the first place, accept mullah representation without this necessary precondition? Come on. Yet an invitation to Tehran nevertheless was extended by the United Nations, an institution which hardly needs more bad press and which, in the space of 24 hours, had to embarrassingly rescind its own courtesy. How this happened remains controversial, with the kindest interpretation being a “multifaceted, multilayered miscommunication,” as former US diplomat Fred Hof diplomatically described it. However, Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman Martin Nesirsky must now be added to the long list of aggrieved parties who believe the United States these days is completely full of shit. “I know for a fact that this could not have been a surprise to the US authorities,” Nesirsky told Foreign Policy about this pre-Geneva SNAFU, as those selfsame US authorities played at innocence and crossed wires with Turtle Bay. What it must take to piss off Ban Ki-moon’s office.

Syrians by now are much wiser. In a week that has seen the most persuasive and tribunal-ready evidence emerge of the systematic torture and murder of some 11,000 prisoners of Assad’s dungeons – many of whom had been starved to death or beaten with rods or strangulated with serrated cords – this is what the US government has managed to contrive in response: “The regime has the ability to improve the atmosphere for negotiations in Geneva by making progress in several areas. However, this latest report of horrific and inhumane prison conditions/actions further underscores that if anything, it is tarnishing the environment for the talks.”

“Improve the atmosphere for negotiations.” “Tarnishing the environment for the talks”– this,even as the barrel bombs continue to fall on Hama and the artillery on Homs, and the prisoners continue to be tortured by the very “state institutions” Washington has said it wants to remain in charge after Assad leaves. Would now be a bad time to mention that Assad’s Minister of Information paraded around Montreux on Wednesday shouting, “Assad will not leave, Assad will not leave”?

The current Alpine pantomime is made even more Prozac-worthy when one weighs exactly what the United States is up against: not very much.

Walid Moallem looks like someone who has just passed out on a toilet at McDonald’s. That he is foreign minister of an important Arab country and has been for some time is tragedy and farce rolled into one. Instead of having handcuffs slapped on him, as would be a sensible response to his appearance in Europe, Moallem has just been granted the opportunity to expiate at endless length, and to accuse the West of “claim[ing] to fight terrorism, but…secretly feed[ing] terrorism.” Leaving aside how this doesn’t bode very well for conciliation by Swiss moonlight, it is also what Freudians would call a serious case of “projection.”

Bizarrely, Moallem’s logic is one that has been taken up by a raft of foreign governments, which really do seem to think that he may be onto something. Western intelligence officials have lately been dispatching Damascus seeking urgent help about nationals who have gone to Syria to practice jihad and may one day return to practice it at home. The problem lies in believing that Assad shares an enmity for transnational terrorism, or is genuinely interested in helping the West to combat it.

The Telegraph’s Ruth Sherlock and Richard Spencer have done us all a great service by reporting that the regime has “funded and co-operated with al-Qaeda in a complex double game even as the terrorists fight Damascus, according to new allegations by Western intelligence agencies, rebels, and al-Qaeda defectors.” This collusion began in the spring of 2013, although Syria’s facilitation of Al-Qaeda actually began more than a decade ago when Assad ran “rat-lines” of jihadists into US-occupied Iraq. The clearinghouse system got so unbearable that one Al-Qaeda operative, a man called “Abu Ghadiya,” had to be assassinated in a cross-border raid by US forces in Deir Ezzor in 2008.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/531937-assads-hypocrisy–and-americas

Previous journalists have also documented how Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s only “official” franchise in Syria, had not only taken control of oil fields in eastern Syria, but had financed its own operations by selling millions of dollars worth of crude back to the regime it was putatively at war with. (This happened at a time when Damascus was importing tanker after tanker of virtually-free petrol from Iran.) But part of what was new in the Telegraph disclosure was that now the Zarqawist offshoot Al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), has also started horning in on the same oil-for-caliphate action.

It was never a coincidence that Assad released many hardened Salafists and jihadists from Sednaya prison in 2011, men who have since gone on to occupy commanding positions in ISIS, Nusra, and the Islamic Front. Dr. Mohammed Habash, a Syrian cleric and former member of parliament who was sent to this prison between 2008 and 2009, told The National this week that Sednaya was a center for radicalization long before schoolchildren sprayed graffiti on the walls of Deraa. Who better, then, to send back into Syrian society during the days of a still-peaceful protest movement than the very terrorists Moallem now accuses the West of helping to destroy his country?

I rang Ruth Sherlock after her story appeared and she kindly shared with me some of the reportage that didn’t make the final cut. Among the highlights: Assef Shawkat – Assad’s brother-in-law and the regime security chief who was first poisoned, then blown up by rebels two summers ago – was the one in charge of coordinating with Al-Qaeda jihadists imprisoned at Sednaya. Also, one defector from ISIS told Sherlock that his former group is indeed infiltrated and manipulated by the mukhabarat. “I know men who were officers in the police and Syrian intelligence branches who are now in ISIS,” he said. “They grew long beards and joined. When I asked my emir I was told they had defected from the regime. But this does not make sense, because ISIS doesn’t accept defectors; they killed a friend of mine because they discovered he had been in the military as a normal soldier.”

So Langley, Riyadh, and Doha are now engaged in fighting the very Al-Qaeda crazies that Moallem pretends is the whole of the Syrian opposition rather than a contractor of the Syrian Oil Ministry and marionette of the secret police.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/assads-no-enemy-of-al-qaeda

Every Syrian revolutionary I’ve ever met or spoken with believes that, at some level, the Machiavellian who used to send “ratlines” of al-Qaeda fighters into Iraq and provide newly arrived jihadist recruits with safe houses in the Jazira, is still working with these erstwhile allies, even at the cost of seeing his own military and security installations blown up in suicide or car bombings. The purpose is to advance a perception that has in fact gained considerable traction in the international press in the last year or so; namely, that Assad is enjoined in the global war on terror and that his enemies are American and Western enemies who should not be aided or armed in any way. (The FSB, Russia’s successor agency to the KGB, has been credibly accused of staging false flag terrorist bombings in and outside of Moscow in 2000 order to rally domestic and international opinion for the Second Chechen War. Because Syria’s intelligence and military elite have all been trained in the former Soviet Union or in post-Soviet Russia, I’d wager that Moscow has been more than a curious bystander in helping Assad realize the propaganda value to be mined from such a perception.)

http://www.newsweek.com/how-syrias-assad-helped-forge-isis-255631

“The regime did not just open the door to the prisons and let these extremists out, it facilitated them in their work, in their creation of armed brigades,” a former member of the Syrian Security Services told the Abu Dhabi newspaper, the National, on condition of anonymity in January this year.

http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/inside-assad-s-playbook-time-and-terror

Early in my career as a Syrian diplomat, I learned to respect the strategic planning of the Assads…ISIS’s role in Syria fits into a plan that has worked for Assad on several occasions. When a crisis emerges, Assad pushes his opponents to spend as much time as possible in developing a response. While implementing such diplomatic stalls, he floods the crisis with distractions designed to divert attention away from Syrian government misdeeds. His favorite diversion is terrorism, because it establishes him as a necessary force to contain it. In the meantime, world events wash away international focus on the initial crisis… During this time, Assad released battle-hardened extremists from the infamous Sednaya prison; extremists with no association to the uprisings. These fighters would go on to lead militant groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra.

In conjunction with the terrorist-release policy, Assad was sure to imprison diverse, non-violent, and pro-reform activists by the thousands, many of whom are still in government prisons.”

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-did-isis-kidnap-james-foley-2014-8#ixzz3D1vo5800

How did ISIS abduct James Foley, who was widely considered to be in the custody of groups loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad?
In the words of Mic politics editor Stefan Becket: “The prevailing assumption was that Foley was being held by pro-Assad forces, or by the regime itself. How did he get from there to ISIS?”

In May 2013, GlobalPost President Philip Balboni released the following statement on behalf of himself and Foley’s parents: “We have obtained multiple independent reports from very credible confidential sources … that confirm our assessment that Jim is now being held by the Syrian government in a prison … under the control of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence service.

Obviously this is just a conspiracy by the Cathedral-controlled media. Just as obviously, the Cathedral is guilty until proven innocent of arming any number of terrorist groups in the region, regardless of if the Cathedral-controlled media has published any evidence to support such a thesis. Just like how Europe had no history of welfare statism until the Cathedral imposed it.