U.S. Supplies ISIS through Turkey
Eric
Zuesse
5
March, 2016
On
Friday, March 4th, the leading opposition newspaper in Turkey, Zaman,
was taken
over by the Government; and, today, March 5th, one of the other
opposition newspapers, Cumhuriyet,
reported thatZaman’s
separate news-service to other news-media, Cihan News Agency, has now
also been disabled on the Internet. (Anyone who goes to the site
obtains an
error-message.)
The
Turkish Government is trying to prevent the Turkish public from
knowing that Turkey has been serving as the transit-route by which
the U.S. government and its allied Arab oil monarchies (especially
Saudi Arabia and Qatar) have been supplying foreign jihadists and
weapons (largely U.S. but paid for with Saudi funds) into Syria to
oust Bashar al-Assad from power.
Zaman’s
editor has been imprisoned for publishing such prohibited truths, but
somehow his newspaper continued reporting on a court case in which
Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdoğan is accused of breaking Turkish
law by aiding terrorists. That continued resistance by the newspaper
might be a reason why the Turkish Government has now (as of Friday
March 4th) shut it down.
On
March 1st, Cumhuriyet,
headlined, “Former
Justice Minister of Turkey: Erdoğan Will Stand Trial,” and
reported that, “Former Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk, said
that Erdoğan’s actions ‘do not comply with the decision
of the Constitutional Court.’ He criticized [Erdoğan] by
saying … ‘One day this matter must be settled by the
judiciary’.”
Russian
Television had first reported on the case, in English, back on 26
November 2015, headlining, “Turkish
newspaper editor in court for ‘espionage’
after revealing weapon convoy to Syrian militants.” This
news-report said that:
In
May, the outlet [Cumhuriyet] published photos of
weapons it said were then transferred to Syria by
Turkey’s intelligence agency. … The articles, published on
Cumhuriyet’s front page in May, claimed that Turkey’s
National Intelligence Organization (MİT) is smuggling weapons
in trucks into Syria and was caught doing so twice in 2014. The
trucks were allegedly stopped and searched by police,
with photos and videos of their contents obtained by Cumhuriyet.
According
to the paper, the trucks were carrying six steel containers,
with 1,000 artillery shells, 50,000 machine gun rounds, 30,000
heavy machine gun rounds and 1,000 mortar shells. The arms
were reportedly delivered to extremist groups fighting against
the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad, whom
Ankara wants ousted from power.
The
Erdoğan government alleged the weapons were “aid to Syrian ethnic
Turkmen tribespeople and labeled their interception by local
police an act of ‘treason’ and ‘espionage’.”
Turkey
is a NATO member, and the famous investigative reporter Seymour
Hersh had revealed in the 6 April 2014 London
Review of Books,
that on 20 June 2013 — just a few months prior to the sarin gas
attack that Obama blamed on Assad and used as his excuse to invade
Syria — the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency reported that
America’s allies in overthrowing Bashar al-Assad were engaged in
“the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort,”
but the U.S. Director of National Intelligence denied that it was
true. One U.S. ally there was Al Qaeda in Syria, known in Syria as Al
Nusra, (Nusra and Erdoğan wanted this gas-attack to
provide the excuse that Obama had set as his “red line” to
overthrow Assad — a chemical-weapons attack in Syria.) However,
Hersh reported, “Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra
Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police
told the press were two kilograms of sarin.” All of that had
occurred prior to the 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack.
Hersh
went on:
The
officer ultimately responsible for the planning and execution of
the attack [U.S. bombing of Syria] was General
Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs. From the beginning
of the crisis, the former intelligence official said, the joint
chiefs had been sceptical of the administration’s argument
that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad’s guilt.
They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more
substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought
Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was
winning the war,’ the former intelligence official said.
Dempsey had irritated many in the Obama administration by
repeatedly warning Congress over the summer of the danger
of American military involvement in Syria.
Hersh
subsequently reported that, rather than go ahead with an operation
that the Joint Chiefs considered fraudulent, they sabotaged Obama’s
policy. On 2 January 2016, Hersh headlined in theLondon
Review of Books, “Military
to Military,” and he explained how and why they had done
this:
The
Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would
have ‘had a zero chance of success.’ So in the autumn of 2013
they decided to take steps against the extremists without going
through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the
militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be
passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy,
Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. … General Dempsey and his
colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept their dissent out of
bureaucratic channels, and survived in office. General Michael Flynn
did not. ‘Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting
on telling the truth about Syria,’ said Patrick Lang, a retired
army colonel who served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East
civilian intelligence officer for the DIA. ‘He thought truth was
the best thing and they shoved him out. He wouldn’t shut up.’
Obama
couldn’t be swayed that the enemy were Al Qaeda and other jihadists
instead of Assad — that overthrowing him was his top priority.
However, Hersh said in his 6 April 2014 article, that Obama had to
backtrack at the last moment anyway, because British intelligence
reported to David Cameron that the sarin used in the attack didn’t
come from Syria — that it had been imported; this implied that it
was a set-up job in order to ‘justify’ invading. Cameron didn’t
want to be just another Tony Blair. Obama couldn’t get his
necessary-for-appearances’-sake public cover for an invasion,
Britain, as his predecessor had done regarding Iraq. Hersh went on,
in that 2014 article:
Obama’s
move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end.
‘Congress was not going to let this go by,’ the former
intelligence official said. ‘Congress made it known that,
unlike the authorisation for the Iraq war, there would
be substantive hearings.’ At this point, there was a sense
of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence
official said.
Obama,
in other words, was now trapped. He couldn’t fire all of his Joint
Chiefs — at least not right away; it would be embarrassing, how
could he explain it? And the Republicans were eager to expose his
Administration’s disarray on the matter. So: the story was passed
around that Secretary of State John Kerry got Russia to get Assad to
eliminate his sarin stocks. Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin was
happy to help Obama avoid invading his Syrian ally. That was how the
‘news’ organizations reported the backtrack — as a rare
instance of U.S.-Russian cooperation: good news for everybody. But
for Obama, it was actually the way out of a desperately embarrassing
situation. And he never gave up his goal of switching Syria from the
secular Assad to a failed state whose crucial oil-pipeline routes
would be in ‘friendly’ (to Saudi Arabia and Qatar) jihadist
Sunni-ruled areas of Syria, so that ‘our’ Arab ‘allies’
(the jihadist-financiing
nations, as even Kerry’s predecessor Hillary Clinton had known
them to be) can grab the world’s largest energy-market, Europe,
away from Russia.
Hersh,
in his 2014 article, continued:
The
full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia
and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to
come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly
admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat
line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat
line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons
and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the
Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who
ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of
them affiliated with al-Qaida. (The DNI spokesperson said:
‘The idea that the United States was providing weapons from
Libya to anyone is false.’)
He
closed:
Barring
a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the
Syrian civil war is likely to go on. ‘I asked my colleagues if
there was any way to stop Erdoğan’s continued support for
the rebels, especially now that it’s going so wrong,’
the former intelligence official told me. ‘The answer was:
“We’re screwed.” We could go public if it was somebody
other than Erdoğan, but Turkey is a special case. They’re a
Nato ally.’
There
is simply too
much evidence proving that Erdoğan is supporting ISIS and other
terrorist groups in Syria. This is the reality of NATO:
conquering Russia, first by switching its allies (such as Iraq,
Libya, Syria, Ukraine, etc.), is the assignment, regardless of the
public’s safety. Even if the U.S. weren’t backing jihadists
directly (which we are), we’re backing them by having jihadist
governments such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar as allies —
instead of as enemies. ‘Our’ oil companies and mega-banks are in
bed with them, and their top stockholders and executives, and their
lobbyists, control the people who control the U.S. Government. The
U.S. Constitution’s “We, the People …” has becomeonly those
“People.” The rest are now just for extras in crowd-scenes, at
political campaign events — and their mass-mind-control is done by
their media, ‘our’ ‘free press’ (who don’t report this
reality), in ‘our’ ‘democracy’.
Erdoğan
is profoundly angry at the unsteady support he has been receiving
from the U.S. government in their joint efforts to eliminate Bashar
al-Assad.
However, apparently, Obama doesn’t feel that the U.S. is
yet ready for a nuclear war to be sparked between NATO and Russia —
Obama thinks that doing it now would be premature. ‘Color
revolutions’ and ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘Maidan demonstrations’,
and other populist covers for coups (taking advantage of the local
political opposition, which exists in any country), are a far safer
way to gradually strip Russia of its allies and turn them into
yet-more enemies of Russia — and, only then, can the rip-cord
finally be pulled, and Russia be forced to either submit or else die
(even if the rest of the world might die also). The U.S. has been
doing this boil-the-frog-slowly routine ever since U.S.
President George Herbert Walker Bush laid the foundation for it in
1990.
As
John Kerry recently said, when responding to aid workers at a donor
conference for anti-Assad forces, “What
do you want me to do? Go to war with Russia? Is that what you
want?” Clearly, Erdoğan is lots more eager for that than
Obama is. Perhaps Erdoğan thinks that Putin would just back down.
American Presidents, however, aren’t so desperate that they feel
they need to do it during their own Administration; they can afford
to wait until the time is right, even if the plaudits will then go to
some future President. Their paymasters will be duly appreciative of
the contributions that each one of them has made toward the final
‘U.S.’ victory. (Victory for the paymasters,
of course.)
So,
the American government’s charade goes
on. But already an MIT analysis — the Lloyd-Postal
report— on the sarin attack that occurred 21 August 2013,
stated unequivocally that the Obama Administration was lying through
its teeth about the matter. They provided excruciating detail showing
why “the US Government’s interpretation of the technical
intelligence it gathered prior to and after the August 21 attack
CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.” (That’s a tactful, yet passionate,
way of saying: “Obama and his Administration were trying to lie
this country into invading Syria.”) Yet, Western news-media still
simply ignore the evidence (they can do that in this dictatorship),
and report that Assad’s forces were behind the sarin attack. It’s
still the
official reason why
we’re at war against Assad.
Was even George W. Bush worse than this?
Seymour
Hersh had tried to get his news-reports on these matters published by
what had been his regular publisher, the New Yorker,
which turned them down; and he tried other U.S. outlets as well, but
wasn’t successful in finding any that would pay his regular charges
— and he had already spent much in order to research these matters.
Finally, he obtained a suitable outlet, in the LRB. This
is why his recent reports are being published abroad.
Anyone
who wishes to know more about what motivates the U.S. government
regarding Syria should read the astoundingly brilliant article by
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., published on an obscure environmental website,
February 25th, “Syria:
Another Pipeline War.” He tells so much suppressed history
there, it’s flabbergasting to see it all brought together into one
flowing historical narrative — and my checking of the few sources
that I hadn’t previously known of indicates that his standards for
quality-of-evidence that he builds his narrative on are as rigorous
and high as mine are — which is rare. I very much respect that.
Every high school student should read his article in order to
understand how corrupt the U.S. is at its highest levels. The article
is a masterpiece of historical writing. But even a masterpiece can
have a flaw: his article plays down the role that leading Democrats
after Reagan have been playing in GHW Bush’s long war to conquer
Russia. We’re still in the post-Reagan era, just as, between FDR
and Reagan, we had been in the post-FDR era. Obama is as rabid a
Russia-hater as practically anyone except John McCain would be. If a
piece of historical writing is going to be partisan (as almost all
are), at least this one is partisan on the less-unacceptable side.
I
might write RFK Jr.’s name onto the Presidential line of my ballot
in November. There’s someone with favorable name-recognition, who
clearly has the integrity and depth, and knowledge, to deal with the
rot that has overtaken America, if
anyone does.
Maybe he could win by acclamation, if he wouldn’t be knocked-off
first. But if the idea of writing in his name goes around like
wildfire in the weeks before the November 8th general election, then
who knows what would happen? Certainly, if Hillary is on the ballot
as the ‘Democratic’ nominee, I won’t vote for her, though I’m
a lifelong Democrat. And I don’t want to be forced to vote for
Trump (since he’s almost totally unpredictable — which still
isn’t as bad as Hillary). (Besides: Hillary should be in prison for
her destruction of crucial public records — State Department emails
— to hide her crimes; and The Donald should be in prison for his
fake Trump ‘University’ commercial fraud. But the corrupt Obama
won’t allow any such prosecutions.) And there’s such beautiful
irony here: “Trump:
If Elected, I’ll Prosecute Hillary.” It’s so much like
Ukraine! (Cast Hillary as Tymoshenko, and Trump as Yanukovych — and
I’d vote then for Trump, so as to avoid the near-certainty
of disaster.)
But
no intelligent American can be justified in simply not voting for
President. That would be outrageously irresponsible. I won’t ever
do that. Every intelligent and caring person must vote for President
— not leave that responsibility to others (which would be
unpatriotic — plus wrong and callous — for any well-informed
voter). The “anyone but ___” non-voters are mere
fools and frauds.
They simply don’t care enough about the country
to do their most-basic civic duty, which is to become informed and
then to vote for someone on that basis (though never as a ‘protest
vote’ — the nation is too important for any mere ‘protest’ —
but only as a real vote, for someone who has
an authentic chance of winning the election).
Any mere throw-away ‘vote’ is like a non-vote.
That
article by Kennedy should be linked to by all of his supporters: it
tells more about the man than any number of campaign speeches
possibly could. It proves that he’s fit for the job, if anyone is.
That’s one person who doesn’t need to campaign for the job. He’s
an outsider whose knowledge and understanding of the subject is
probably among the best there is, and whose heart is unquestionably
in the right place — which would be a refreshing and radical
change, a change that’s of a kind needed now more than ever in the
U.S.
But
anyway: RFK Jr.’s article is a must-read for anyone who wants to
understand the horrendous war in Syria. My article here is just a
warm-up to it — and, I hope, a totally non-partisan
one.
—————
Investigative
historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re
Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records,
1910-2010, and
of CHRIST’S
VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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