16/05/2017
BEIRUT, LEBANON (10:12 P.M.) – Google has helped Al-Qaeda and other Salafist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood gain new members at the dawn of the Syrian conflict, secret documents and e-mails published by Wikileaks show.
The then director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen coordinated actions to support the groups often dubbed as rebels with then U.S. Foreign Minister Hillary Clinton and Deputy U.S. State Secretary William Burns. Google employed it’s expertise in the IT sector to help the conflict in Syria gain traction.
In July 2012 Google provided a software tool, with which defections in Syria were to be tracked and the thereby gained informations spread in Syria with the help of Al-Jazeera. According to the plotting of U.S. officials and Google, this should encourage more people to take up arms and join the ranks of the rebels. Then Director of Policy Planning for Obama, Jake Sullivan let Hillary Clinton, for which he served as an advisor in the last presidential election, know that, “this is a pretty cool idea.”
The U.S. administration back in 2012 was already aware of the fact, that the opposition in the Syrian conflict mainly consists of Al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups. In a then secret, now publicly available internal report of the U.S. administration on the Syrian conflict is stated, that “the salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”
Furthermore the rise of the Islamic State was anticipated to result out of an empowered Al-Qaeda along the Syrian-Iraqi border: “If the situation there unravels, there is the possibilty of establishing a declared or undeclared salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasakah and Deir Ezzor) and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want.”
Supporting Al-Qaeda it seems, was already feasible for the U.S. administration in 2012, just 11 years and 2 wars after the Twin Towers in New York were hit by planes. Sullivan wrote in another mail reporting to Clinton about the Syrian conflict in 2012 that “Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.”
Google which tries to gain users trust with it’s slogan -Don’t be evil- since year 2000, has also evolved. In 2015 the company was restructured, with Alphabet now being the parent organisation of the subbranches like Google, Verily and Google Ideas. It has also become part of the U.S. military industrial complex, which provides products and services essential for the deployment and sustenance of military operations, as NSA director Keith Alexander assessed.
Alphabet’s head Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen envisioned this new status for Google: “What Lockheed Martin was for the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be for the twenty-first.”
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
No comments:
Post a Comment