The war on ISIS.
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- Johnnypenso
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So a pair of extremist Muslim parents who meddled with ISIS in Syria returned to their home country of Indonesia to blow up a church, and killed their own kids in the attack too.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44100278
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44100278
Dotini
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Deputy National Security adviser Ben Rhodes and President Obama. Image source: AP via Commentary Magazine
It is now clear from multiple sources that:
- Possibly the largest CIA covert program in history, started by Obama, armed and funded a jihadist insurgency bent on overthrowing Assad to the tune of $1 billion a year.
- ISIS and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) jointly fought under a single US-backed command structure during the early years of the war in Syria, even as late as throughout 2013.
Ben Rhodes Admits Obama Armed Jihadists In Syria In Bombshell Interview
by Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/24/2018 - 21:45
Someone finally asked Obama administration officials to own up to the rise of ISIS and arming jihadists in Syria.
In a wide ranging interview titled "Confronting the Consequences of Obama's Foreign Policy" The Intercept's Mehdi Hasan put the question to Ben Rhodes, who served as longtime deputy national security adviser at the White House under Obama and is now promoting his newly published book, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House.
Rhodes has been described as being so trusted and close to Obama that he was "in the room" for almost every foreign policy decision of significance that Obama made during his eight years in office. While the Intercept interview is worth listening to in full, it's the segment on Syria that caught our attention.
In spite of Rhodes trying to dance around the issue, he sheepishly answers in the affirmative when Mehdi Hasan asks the following question about supporting jihadists in Syria:
Did you intervene too much in Syria? Because the CIA spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding and arming anti-Assad rebels, a lot of those arms, as you know, ended up in the hands of jihadist groups, some even in the hands of ISIS.
Your critics would say you exacerbated that proxy war in Syria; you prolonged the conflict in Syria; you ended up bolstering jihadists.
Rhodes initially rambles about his book and "second guessing" Syria policy in avoidance of the question. But Hasan pulls him back with the following: "Oh, come on, but you were coordinating a lot of their arms."
The two spar over Hasan's charge of "bolstering jihadists" in the following key section of the interview, at the end of which Rhodes reluctantly answers "yeah..." — but while trying to pass ultimate blame onto US allies Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia (similar to what Vice President Biden did in a 2014 speech):
MH: Oh, come on, but you were coordinating a lot of their arms. You know, the U.S. was heavily involved in that war with the Saudis and the Qataris and the Turks.
BR: Well, I was going to say: Turkey, Qatar, Saudi.
MH: You were in there as well.
BR: Yeah, but, the fact of the matter is that once it kind of devolved into kind of a sectarian-based civil war with different sides fighting for their perceived survival, I think we, the ability to bring that type of situation to close, and part of what I wrestled with in the book is the limits of our ability to pull a lever and make killing like that stop once it’s underway.
To our knowledge this is the only time a major media organization has directly asked a high ranking foreign policy adviser from the Obama administration to own up to the years long White House support to jihadists in Syria.
Though the interview was published Friday, its significance went without notice or comment in the mainstream media over the weekend (perhaps predictably). Instead, what did circulate was a Newsweek article mocking "conspiracy theories" surrounding the rapid rise of ISIS, including the following:
President Donald Trump has done little to dispel the myth of direct American support for ISIS since he took office. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump claimed—without providing any evidence—that President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-founded the group and that ISIS “honors” the former president.
Of course, the truth is a bit more nuanced than that, as Trump himself elsewhere seemed to acknowledge, and which ultimately led to the president reportedly shutting down the CIA's covert Syrian regime change program in the summer of 2017 while complaining to aides about the shocking brutality of the CIA-trained "rebels".
Meanwhile, mainstream media has been content to float the falsehood that President Obama's legacy is that he "stayed out" of Syria, instead merely approving some negligible level of aid to so-called "moderate" rebels who were fighting both Assad and (supposedly) the Islamic State. Rhodes has himself in prior interviews attempted to portray Obama as wisely staying "on the sidelines" in Syria.
But as we've pointed out many times over the years, this narrative ignores and seeks to whitewash possibly the largest CIA covert program in history, started by Obama, which armed and funded a jihadist insurgency bent of overthrowing Assad to the tune of $1 billion a year (one-fifteenth of the CIA’s publicly known budget according to leaked Edward Snowden documents revealed by the Washington Post).
It also ignores the well established fact, documented in both US intelligence reports and authenticated battlefield footage, that ISIS and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) jointly fought under a single US-backed command structureduring the early years of the war in Syria, even as late as throughout 2013 — something confirmed by University of Oklahoma professor Joshua Landis, widely considered to be the world's foremost expert on Syria.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018...ama-armed-jihadists-syria-bombshell-interview
Something to think on: Now what are the implications of this on MI5 and MI6?
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Something to really think on is that all the juicy emboldened quotes come from the interviewer's questions, not the interviewees answers. The closest to any confimation is "Yeah..." which, when drawn out in American and British spoken English, is often just a meaningless precursor to a sentence that somebody is still thinking about.
It would be nice to have some actual meat from the interviewee himself.
Dotini
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I as much as anyone else believes in the value of a beautiful, useful or necessary lie (or delusions) in lieu of a very ugly truth.
Even so, it may eventually be necessary for all of us to face the reality that terrorism at home is blowback from our own misguided interventions abroad, that there is nothing to be done about it, and that complaint, sniveling and whinging is futile. Your security services may have very little agency, amounting to little more than catamites to the CIA.
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SestoScudo
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People need to remember that FSA had many people who held different ideologies fighting together. Hardcore islamists started to grow because the fsa did not kick them out but kept them as they saw them as effective fighters against the Assad government. But I think the split began when isis and fsa declared war on each other they were allies once until they turned against each other. If Assad was taken out sooner I think the fsa and other hardcore islamists would have most likely fought each other for the control of the country.
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It wasn't the first time the US backed radical islamists for their political goals.
There was a moderate rebel who later slightly changed the architecture of New York.
There was a moderate rebel who later slightly changed the architecture of New York.
SestoScudo
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It wasn't the first time the US backed radical islamists for their political goals.
There was a moderate rebel who later slightly changed the architecture of New York.
Ronald Regan also calling the leaders of the Mujahideen the equivalents of the founding fathers.
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That's been very clear since 9/11 at the very latest, but it's unlikely to ever become popular public opinion because it's so strongly in the government's interest not to admit fault.
I admit that I'm reminded of when I first read 1984, and Oceania shifts from being allied with Eastasia to Eurasia and the state pretends that it's never been anything different. As a teenager I recognised the similarity to how small groups and religions tend to retcon their own histories, but I didn't think that such was really possible on a large scale in real society.
How wrong I was. It absolutely works on the scale of countries as well. Most people simply don't have enough interest in history to question the story that is placed in front of them.
SestoScudo
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I dont want to defend Osama Bin Laden but didnt he declare war on the USA because of its wreckless foreign policy in the middle east??
Like the support of israel and most important of all which made him crack was American bases in his homeland of Saudi Arabia.
Like the support of israel and most important of all which made him crack was American bases in his homeland of Saudi Arabia.
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I hardly think the fact that the USA doesn't allow extremists to drive Israel into extinction and a physical presence in your home country are defendable reasons for what he did.
SestoScudo
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Well for him it was justifiable. One man would choose one problem or issue to justify his actions and in turn rally people to a common cause.
Same can be said for many past historical figures.
Osama actions not just got innocent people killed but his actions also led to the invasion of two countries which led to deaths of so many Muslims which he said his actions was doing it for the interests of Muslims and Islam.
Its a matter of fact that extremists and terrorists get their own people killed more than the supposed enemy they are trying to fight.
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There's a bit more to it than that, but yes, there's not really any way to justify flying planes full of civilians into buildings full of civilians. There are reasons that could have justified aggressive actions against the US and it's forces, but 9/11 style attacks on civilians outside of a declared state of war is nearly impossible to justify outside of an immediate existential threat.
Is it? I would have imagined that would be on a case by case basis. If they're fighting the US, it's a near certainty because of how well equipped the US forces are. If they're fighting similarly equipped and organised forces, I imagine not so much.
Besides, given that pretty much all the "terrorist" groups these days seem to be proxies for some larger state I think that it's not really so much down to the "leadership" of the terrorists as it is manipulation and encouragement from the powers that be. Terrorists as proxy armies are great because the power behind them gets something they want whether the terrorists win or lose. Sending the dissidents within your own country/religion off to die senselessly against some arbitrary foreign enemy is a great way to deal with that problem.
SestoScudo
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The USA no doubt has much more capability in killing scores of people compared to terrorists because of its technology hence why they engage in State Terrorism.
Usa is a prime example of it engaging in state terrorism but examples can apply to past regimes like Nazi Germany or the Soviets. Heck state terrorism was also conducted by many empires in past.
Boko Haram is a prime example of killing its own. Boko Haram just goes around suicide bombing markets and mosques rather than fighting the Nigerian army. They even use religion to justify it by making takfir which means excommunication so when they bomb Muslims they consider them not be Muslims.
Another Islamic terrorist group which has no doubt been forgotten is the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria they have to be one of the worst of all Islamic extremists in my opinion they massacred algerian villages, killed people in their own ranks and hijacked commercial planes to make it more disturbing the Algerian government literally did nothing and stood by watch its own people getting massacred.
GIA justified their massacres by using takfir by excommunicating Muslims which means they can slaughter them since they consider the Muslims they are killing as not to be Muslims.
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A Yazidi woman is being stalked by her former IS captor in Germany...
https://www.dw.com/en/yazidi-woman-encounters-islamic-state-captor-in-germany/a-45114593
It reminded me of a powerful and shocking documentary on the BBC recently where an investigative journalist took a Yazidi woman to meet a convicted IS fighter who had been sentenced to death for his role in the genocide against the Yazidis in Iraq.
At just 21 years old, he had been actively involved in fighting for IS for a few years. They asked him how many people he had personally killed, his reply was 'about 900'. He also claimed to have raped over 200 women/girls.
The documentary also highlighted the difficulties faced in bringing the guilty to justice - as well as the dangers of miscarriages of justice happening as well, and yet, somehow, some of these people (and the numbers are unknown) are walking free on the streets of Europe today.
https://www.dw.com/en/yazidi-woman-encounters-islamic-state-captor-in-germany/a-45114593
It reminded me of a powerful and shocking documentary on the BBC recently where an investigative journalist took a Yazidi woman to meet a convicted IS fighter who had been sentenced to death for his role in the genocide against the Yazidis in Iraq.
At just 21 years old, he had been actively involved in fighting for IS for a few years. They asked him how many people he had personally killed, his reply was 'about 900'. He also claimed to have raped over 200 women/girls.
The documentary also highlighted the difficulties faced in bringing the guilty to justice - as well as the dangers of miscarriages of justice happening as well, and yet, somehow, some of these people (and the numbers are unknown) are walking free on the streets of Europe today.
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I'm sure he could be deported if the German authorities decide to pursue the claims against him, though it might be tricky for the EU to deport someone without solid evidence of their alleged crimes or, as is quite likely, he may face the death penalty (like the guy I mentioned above) in which case deporting him from Germany would violate EU law as well as his human rights. In the meantime, let's hope this 'multi-kulti' thing works! 👍
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Let's keep pretending that it works.
And as for those who need deportation, it's time to rewrite some rules in the EU. If there is just a smidge of evidence, on the plane you go. Let us also pretend that we have faith in the Middle Eastern Judicial systems.
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