Tony
Cartalucci
The US State Department, and to a greater extent, US foreign policy itself,
having exhausted completely their collective credibility, has attempted yet
another “reset.” By bringing in John Kerry to pose as the next US Secretary of
State, it is hoped global opinion will see US foreign policy in a new, more
tolerant light. Kerry, however, has wasted no time attempting to simply resell
verbatim the same failed, absurd policy US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
destroyed her career peddling, spinning, and covering up – as finalized in the
case of Benghazi, Libya.
Image:
US Secretary of State John Kerry talks with
pro-Al
Qaeda Mouaz al-Khatib, who heads the militant front set to receive an
additional $60 million in US aid claimed to be “non-lethal.” The UK, and more
astonishingly, France who is fighting terrorists in Mali created by a similar
intervention in Libya in 2011, have announced similar plans to further aid and
abet terrorists in Syria.
The Washington Post’s
piece, “
U.S.
announces expanded battlefield aid to Syrian rebels, but not arms,” rehashes
the same tired, patently false narrative that has been used throughout the
duration of the US-fueled Syrian conflict. The Washington Post reports:
The Obama administration will provide food and medicine to Syrian rebel
fighters, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Thursday, announcing a cautious
U.S. foray into front-line battlefield support that falls far short of the heavy
weapons or high-tech gear the rebels seek.
“The stakes are really high, and we can’t risk letting this country — in the
heart of the Middle East — be destroyed by vicious autocrats or hijacked by the
extremists,” Kerry said following discussions among a group of Western and Arab
nations that are funding, and in some cases arming, the
fighters.
The United States will, for the first time, send supplies through the rebels’
central military headquarters, with U.S. advisers supervising the distribution
of food rations and medical supplies, U.S. officials said. The shift is intended
to give the U.S.-backed Syrian Opposition Coalition greater say over the aid,
but it is also a test of the rebels’ ability to keep donated supplies out of the
hands of extremists in their midst.
The Washington Post report is a verified lie. US assistance, cash, weapons,
and covert military support had been ongoing in Syria since 2007 – in other
words – before the current conflict even began. And the US has been providing
this support not for moderates, but specifically and intentionally for the
ideological foundation of Al Qaeda itself, the sectarian extremist Muslim
Brotherhood, since the Bush administration.
Outright admissions by administration officials, Saudi and Lebanese officials
working in tandem with the US, and US intelligence agents have outlined a
criminal conspiracy that has now transcended two presidencies and provided the
clearest example yet of the corporate-financier driven “continuity of agenda”
that truly guides Western foreign policy. This criminal conspiracy has also
incurred a staggering list of egregious crimes against humanity, crimes we are
reminded of daily by the very interests responsible for them, including the
70,000 alleged dead in the Syrian conflict so far.
Secretary John Kerry’s Narrative is a Verified Lie
Secretary Kerry’s “desire” to keep weapons out of the hands of extremists is
willfully disingenuous misdirection. It has been extremists the US has been, on
record, purposefully propping up in Syria years before the conflict even began
in 2011.
Pulitizer Prize-winning
journalist Seymour Hersh, in his 2007 New Yorker report titled, “
The
Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the
war on terrorism?“stated explicitly that:
“To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration
has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In
Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which
is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the
Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in
clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these
activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a
militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al
Qaeda.”
Hersh’s report would also include:
“the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and
logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The
Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it
more conciliatory and open to negotiations.”
Hersh also reported that a supporter of the Lebanese pro-US-Saudi Hariri
faction had met Dick Cheney in Washington and relayed personally the importance
of using the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in any move against the ruling
government:
“[Walid] Jumblatt then told me that he had met with Vice-President Cheney in
Washington last fall to discuss, among other issues, the possibility of
undermining Assad. He and his colleagues advised Cheney that, if the United
States does try to move against Syria, members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood
would be “the ones to talk to,” Jumblatt said.”
The article would continue by explaining how already in 2007 US and Saudi
backing had begun benefiting the Brotherhood:
“There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already
benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition
of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim
Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the
Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have
provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead
with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that
Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the
knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met
with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.)
A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of
the Front with travel documents.”
At one point in Hersh’s report, it is even admitted that officials from US
ally Saudi Arabia admitted to “controlling” the “religious fundamentalists.” The
report states specifically:
“…[Saudi Arabia's] Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that
“they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message
to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we
don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them
at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to
work with Hezbollah and Iran.”
While Kerry, as did Clinton before him, and others throughout the Western
establishment attempt to portray the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its
armed front, Al Qaeda, in Syria as an unforeseeable, unfortunate consequence of
an equally unforeseeable, unfortunate conflict – it is clear that in 2007, such
“consequences” were essential elements of a premeditated conflict the West had
poured cash, weapons, and logistics into the creation of, along with its
partners in the Middle East, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
Also in 2007, the Wall
Street Journal would publish a report titled, “
To Check Syria,
U.S. Explores Bond With Muslim Brothers.” In this report, it was revealed
that even in 2007, Syrian opposition groups were being created from whole-cloth
by the US State Department and paraded around in front of Syria’s embassies in
the West. The article begins with one such protest, stating:
On a humid afternoon in late May, about 100 supporters of Syria’s largest
exile opposition group, the National Salvation Front, gathered outside
Damascus’s embassy here to protest Syrian President Bashar Assad’s rule. The
participants shouted anti-Assad slogans and raised banners proclaiming: “Change
the Regime Now.”
Later in the article, it
would be revealed that the National Salvation Front (NSF) was in contact with
the US State Department and that a Washington-based consulting firm in fact
assisted the NSF in organizing the rally:
In the weeks before the presidential election, the State Department’s Middle
East Partnership Initiative, which promotes regional democracy, and NSF members
met to talk about publicizing Syria’s lack of democracy and low voter turnout,
participants say. A Washington-based consulting firm, C&O Resources Inc.,
assisted the NSF in its planning for the May 26 anti-Assad rally at the Syrian
embassy, providing media and political contacts. State Department officials
stress they provided no financial or technical support to the
protestors.
And while the Wall Street Journal then, just as the US State Department and
the Western media houses are now portraying the Syrian opposition as
representing a wide range of interests across Syrian society, it was admitted
then, just as it is plainly obvious now, that the sectarian extremist Muslim
Brotherhood was in fact at the very center of the “uprising:”
One of the NSF’s most influential members is the Syrian branch of the Muslim
Brotherhood — the decades-old political movement active across the Middle East
whose leaders have inspired the terrorist groups Hamas and al Qaeda. Its Syrian
offshoot says it has renounced armed struggle in favor of democratic
reform.
It was evidently clear, even in 2007, that extremists would play a leading
role in any future armed conflict to overthrow the Syrian government, and now,
years later, that engineered conflict has been executed verbatim and to horrific
consequence – consequences the West not only refuses to take responsibility for,
but seeks to further compound with increased aid to the forces of armed sedition
it itself created.
Absurdity of Kerry’s Narrative Only Outdone by Proposed Solution
The solution Kerry proposes
is to flood Syria with more cash, equipment, training, weapons, and other aid,
either directly, or laundered through proxies such as
Al
Qaeda’s chief financiers and arms providers, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The
Washington Post’s report states:
The goal of the new money is to counter the increasingly effective network of
services provided by militants.
Unfortunately, the
so-called “Syrian Opposition Coalition” handcrafted by the US, and founded in
Doha, Qatar, is led by an extremist, Mouaz al-Khatib, who openly embraces Al
Qaeda’s al-Nusra front in Syria, credited with some of the most heinous
atrocities committed during the 2 year conflict, as well as
systematic abuse, oppression, and subjugation in all areas along Syria’s
border with NATO-member Turkey it controls.
In late 2012, al-Khatib
demanded that the US reverse its decision to list al-Nusra as a foreign
terrorist organization.
Reuters
quoted al-Khatib as saying:
“The decision to consider a party that is fighting the regime as a terrorist
party needs to be reviewed. We might disagree with some parties and their ideas
and their political and ideological vision. But we affirm that all the guns of
the rebels are aimed at overthrowing the tyrannical criminal
regime.”
The more recent
Washington
Post article, in fact, reaffirms al-Khatib’s support for extremists groups,
stating:
Coalition chairman Mouaz
al-Khatib angrily appealed for a humanitarian corridor to the besieged city of
Homs and said the rebels are tired of Western complaints about
extremists
in their ranks. He argued that the real enemy is the Assad regime but said
too many outsiders are worried only about “the length of a beard of a
fighter.”
The Syrian opposition leader’s finger-jabbing anger was in marked contrast to
Kerry’s clipped and measured tone. Kerry looked at Khatib without expression as
the Syrian spoke.
And yet this US-created “opposition” movement, run by a leader openly
embracing and defending Al Qaeda, will be the recipient of some $60 million in
“non-lethal aid” and “training” to allegedly “undermine” Al Qaeda. The
Washington Post indicated that France and the UK were even considering sending
armored vehicles to the openly pro-Al Qaeda front.
The face-value absurdity of current Western foreign policy in the wake of a
decade-long “War on Terror” that has left it bankrupt, thousands of its soldiers
dead, tens of thousands more maimed or mentally ill, is perhaps so profoundly
acute, it is hoped it is easier to instead believe US Secretary of State John
Kerry’s repeated lies.
And astonishingly, even as
French soldiers die fighting militants in Mali – armed, trained, and funded
by NATO’s similar intervention in Libya in 2011, and
allegedly still funded and armed by US, UK, and French ally Qatar –
the Washington
Post article indicates France will be eagerly making the same “mistake” in
Syria, and will be further assisting terrorists there, including the training of
rebel forces “outside Syria.”
The exhausted legitimacy of the West, punctuated by unhinged hypocrisy, and
rapidly unraveling financial and military might, would seem a perfect
opportunity for the United Nations to prove its relevance or legitimacy by
condemning the purposeful expansion of an already intolerable proxy war
initiated by Western interests. Instead, it remains silent, or worse yet,
complicit in the premeditated, documented assault on Syria under the
increasingly tenuous guise of “democracy promotion,” “revolution,” and
“humanitarian concern.”
Nations existing outside
the West’s unraveling international enterprise would do best to continue
resisting, and increasingly condemning the overt state-sponsorship of terrorism
that is destroying Syria. For the rest of us, we must
identify
the corporate-financier interests driving this agenda – interests we most
likely patronize on a daily basis,
and
both boycott and
permanently
replace them to erode the unwarranted influence they have used to both plan
and execute this assault on Syria’s people.
Uprooted Palestinian
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
US Secretary of State John Kerry was due to discuss the
Syria crisis with Turkey's leaders on Friday in talks likely to be strained by
controversial comments by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan branding Zionism a
"crime against humanity."
