The Day After Damascus Falls: the Beginning of the End for the American Republic By Robert Parry

The Day After Damascus Falls: the Beginning of the End for the American Republic

By Robert Parry

If Syrian President Bashar al-Assad meets the same fate as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, much of Official Washington would rush out to some chic watering hole to celebrate – one more “bad guy” down, one more “regime change” notch on the belt. But the day after Damascus falls could mark the beginning of the end for the American Republic.

As Syria would descend into even bloodier chaos – with an Al-Qaeda affiliate or its more violent spin-off, the Islamic State, the only real powers left – the first instinct of American politicians and pundits would be to cast blame, most likely at President Barack Obama for not having intervened more aggressively earlier.

A favorite myth of Official Washington is that Syrian “moderates” would have prevailed if only Obama had bombed the Syrian military and provided sophisticated weapons to the rebels.

Though no such “moderate” rebel movement ever existed – at least not in any significant numbers – that reality is ignored by all the “smart people” of Washington. It is simply too good a talking point to surrender. The truth is that Obama was right when he told  New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in August 2014 that the notion of a “moderate” rebel force that could achieve much was “always … a fantasy.”

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in front of a poster of his father, Hafez al-Assad.

As much fun as the “who lost Syria” finger-pointing would be, it would soon give way to the horror of what would likely unfold in Syria with either Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front or the spin-off Islamic State in charge – or possibly a coalition of the two with Al-Qaeda using its new base to plot terror attacks on the West while the Islamic State engaged in its favorite pastime, those YouTube decapitations of infidels – Alawites, Shiites, Christians, even some descendants of the survivors from Turkey’s Armenian genocide a century ago who fled to Syria for safety.

Such a spectacle would be hard for the world to watch and there would be demands on President Obama or his successor to “do something.” But realistic options would be few, with a shattered and scattered Syrian army no longer a viable force capable of driving the terrorists from power.

The remaining option would be to send in the American military, perhaps with some European allies, to try to dislodge Al-Qaeda and/or the Islamic State. But the prospects for success would be slim. The goal of conquering Syria – and possibly re-conquering much of Iraq as well – would be costly, bloody and almost certainly futile.

The further diversion of resources and manpower from America’s domestic needs also would fuel the growing social discontent in major U.S. cities, like what is now playing out in Baltimore where disaffected African-American communities are rising up in anger against poverty and the police brutality that goes with it. A new war in the Middle East would accelerate America’s descent into bankruptcy and a dystopian police state.

The last embers of the American Republic would fade. In its place would be endless war and a single-minded devotion to security. The National Security Agency already has in place the surveillance capabilities to ensure that any civil resistance could be thwarted.

Can This Fate Be Avoided?

But is there a way to avoid this grim fate? Is there a way to wind this scenario back to some point before this outcome becomes inevitable? Can the U.S. political/media system – as corrupt and cavalier as it is – find a way to avert such a devastating foreign policy disaster?

To do so would require Official Washington to throw off old dependencies, such as its obeisance to the Israel Lobby, and old habits, such as its reliance on manipulative PR to control the American people, patterns deeply engrained in the political process.

At least since the Reagan administration – with its “kick the Vietnam Syndrome” fascination via “public diplomacy” and “perception management” – the tendency has been to designate some foreign leader as the latest new villain and then whip up public hysteria in support of a “regime change.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Victory of Perception Management.”]

In the 1980s, we saw the use of these “black hat/white hat” exaggerations in Nicaragua, where  President Ronald Reagan deemed President Daniel Ortega “the dictator in designer glasses” as Reagan’s propagandists depicted Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as a “totalitarian dungeon” and the CIA-trained Contra “freedom fighters” the “moral equal of the Founding Fathers.”

And, since Ortega and the Sandinistas were surely not the embodiment of all virtue, it was hard to put Reagan’s black-and-white depiction into the proper shades of gray. To make the effort opened you to charges of being a “Sandinista apologist.” Similarly, any negative news about the Contras – such as their tendencies to rape, murder, torture and smuggle drugs – was sternly suppressed with offending U.S. journalists targeted for career retaliation.

The pattern set by Reagan around Nicaragua and other Central American conflicts became the blueprint for how to carry out these post-Vietnam War propaganda operations. Afterwards came Panama’s “madman” Manuel Noriega in 1989 and Iraq’s “worse than Hitler” Saddam Hussein in 1990-91. Each American war was given its own villainous lead actor.

In 2002-03, Hussein was brought back to reprise his “worse-than-Hitler” role in a post-9/11 sequel. His new evil-doing involved sharing nuclear weapons and other WMD with Al-Qaeda so the terror group could inflict even worse havoc on the innocent United States. Anyone who questioned Official Washington’s WMD “group think” was dismissed as a “Saddam apologist.”

Amid this enforced consensus, there was great joy when the U.S.-led invasion overthrew Hussein’s government and captured him. “We got him,” U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer exulted when Hussein was pulled from a “spider hole” and was soon heading to the gallows.

However, some of the triumphal excitement wore off when the U.S. occupation forces failed to discover the promised caches of WMD. Hussein’s ouster also didn’t produce the sunny new day that America’s neocons had promised for Iraq and the Middle East. Instead, Al-Qaeda, which had not existed under Hussein’s secular regime, found fertile soil to plant its “Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” a radical Sunni movement which pioneered a particularly graphic form of terrorist violence.

That brutality, often directed at Shiites, was met with brutality in kind from Iraq’s new Shiite leadership, touching off a sectarian civil war. Meanwhile, the war against the U.S. occupation turned into a messy struggle between America’s high-tech military and Iraq’s low-tech resistance.

Lessons Unlearned

What Americans should have learned from Iraq was that just because the neocons and their liberal-interventionist friends identify a foreign “bad guy” – and then exaggerate his faults – doesn’t mean that his violent removal is the best idea. It might actually lead to something worse. There is wisdom in the doctor’s oath, “first, do no harm,” and there’s truth in the old warning that before you tear down a wall, you should ask why someone built it in the first place.

However, in the propaganda world of Official Washington, a different lesson was learned: that it is easy to create designated villains and no one of importance will dare challenge the wisdom of removing that villain through another “regime change.”

Instead of the neocons and their liberal helpers being held accountable and removed from the corridors of power, they entrenched themselves more deeply inside the U.S. government, mainstream media and big-name think tanks. They also found new allies among the self-righteous “human rights” community espousing the theory of “responsibility to protect” or “R2P.”

Despite President Obama’s election – partly driven by the American people’s revulsion over the neocon excesses during President George W. Bush’s administration – there was no real purge of the neocons and their accomplices. Indeed, Obama kept in place Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the neocons’ beloved Gen. David Petraeus while installing neocon-lite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Around Obama at the White House were prominent R2Pers such as Samantha Power.

So, although Obama may have personally favored a more realist-driven foreign policy that would deal with the world as it is, not as one might dream it to be, he never took control of his own administration, passively accepting the rise of a new generation of interventionists who continued depicting designated foreign villains as evil and rejecting any discouraging word that “regime change” might actually unleash even worse evil.

In 2011, the R2Pers, as the neocons’ junior partners, largely initiated the U.S.-orchestrated “regime change” in Libya, which starred Muammar Gaddafi in a returning role as “the world’s most dangerous man.” All the old terror charges against him were resurrected, including some like the Pam Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 that he very likely didn’t do. But, again, no one wanted to quibble because that would make you a “Gaddafi apologist.”

So, to the gleeful delight of Secretary of State Clinton, Gaddafi was overthrown, captured, beaten, sodomized with a knife, and then murdered. Clinton made no effort to conceal her glee. “We came, we saw, he died,” she joked at the news of his murder (although it was not clear that she knew all the grisly details at the time).

But Gaddafi’s demise did not bring Nirvana to Libya. Indeed, Gaddafi’s warning about the need to attack Islamic terrorists operating in eastern Libya – his military offensive that led to the R2P demand that Obama intervene militarily to stop Gaddafi – proved to be prophetic.

Extremists grabbed control of much of Libya. They overran the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, killing the U.S. ambassador and three other U.S. diplomatic personnel. A civil war has now spread anarchy and mayhem across Libya and nearby countries.

Libya also now has its own branch of the Islamic State, which videotaped its beheadings of Coptic Christians along a beach on the Mediterranean Sea, a sickening sign of what could be expected after a possible Syrian “regime change” next. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The US Hand in Libya’s Tragedy.”]

On to Ukraine

While U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and other R2Pers took the lead in provoking the Libyan fiasco, neocon holdovers demonstrated their own “regime change” skills by turning a pedestrian political dispute in Ukraine – about how fast to build new economic ties to Europe while maintaining old ones with Russia – into not only a civil war in Ukraine but a revival of the Cold War between the United States and Russia.

In the Ukraine case, the neocons made elected President Viktor Yanukovych wear the black hat with Russian President Vladimir Putin fitted for even a bigger black hat. So, as Yanukovych and Putin were scripted as the new “bad guys,” the anti-Yanukovych protesters and rioters at the Maidan square were made into the white-hatted “good guys.”

Much as with the Sandinistas and the Contras in the 1980s, this dichotomy required assigning all evil to Yanukovych and Putin while absolving the Maidan crowd of all sins, including the key role played by neo-Nazi militias in both the Feb. 22, 2014 coup and the subsequent civil war. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Seeing No Neo-Nazi Militias in Ukraine.”]

As the Ukraine crisis has played out, Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. news media have consistently placed all blame for the violence on Yanukovych – lodging the dubious charge that he had snipers kill both police and protesters on Feb. 20, 2014 – or on Putin – fingering him for the still-unsolved case of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down on July 17, 2014.

Evidence that suggests that right-wing Ukrainian elements were responsible for those pivotal events is sloughed off with anyone daring to dispute the conventional wisdom deemed a “Putin apologist.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust.”]

Meanwhile, starting in 2011, the neocons and the R2Pers were both active in pushing for the overthrow of Syria’s President Assad, who – like all the other “bad guys” – has been made into a one-dimensional villain brutalizing innocent “moderates” who stand for all that is good and right in the world.

The fact that the anti-Assad opposition has always included Sunni extremists and terrorists drawing support from Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian Sunni Persian Gulf states is another inconvenient truth that usually gets kept out of the mainstream narrative.

Though it’s surely true that both sides in the Syrian civil war have engaged in atrocities, the neocon-R2P storyline – for much of the civil war – was to consistently blame Assad and to conveniently absolve the rebels. Thus, on Aug. 21, 2013, when a mysterious sarin gas attack killed several hundred people in a Damascus suburb, the rush to judgment blamed Assad’s forces, despite logic and evidence that it was more likely a provocation by rebel extremists. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “A Fact-Resistant ‘Group Think’ on Syria.”]

Though it was less clear in August 2013, it soon became obvious that the most effective rebel fighters were Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the Islamic State, which had evolved from the hyper-violent “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” into the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” before adopting the name, “Islamic State.” By September 2013, many of the U.S.-armed and CIA-trained fighters of the Free Syrian Army had thrown in their lot with either Nusra Front or Islamic State. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Syrian Rebels Embrace Al-Qaeda.”]

No Self-Criticism

But the opinion leaders of Official Washington are not exactly self-critical when they misread a foreign crisis. To explain why the beloved Syrian “moderates” joined forces with Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, the neocons and the R2Pers blamed Obama for not intervening militarily earlier to achieve “regime change” against Assad.

In other words, no lessons were learned from the experiences in Iraq and Libya – that “regime change” is a dangerous strategy that fails to take into account the complexities of the countries where the United States decides to overthrow governments.

The same unlearned lesson should have applied to Ukraine, a strategically important nation to Russia and one in which much of the population is ethnic Russian. But there neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland brushed aside the possibility of a costly showdown with Russia – a conflict that could potentially evolve into a nuclear conflagration – in order to pursue the “regime change” model.

While Ukraine today remains engulfed in chaos – the same as “regime change” experiments Iraq and Libya – the most potentially catastrophic “regime change” could come in Syria. The neocons and the R2Pers – as well as the mainstream U.S. media – remain set on ousting Assad, a goal also shared by Israel, Saudi Arabia and other hard-line Sunni states.

For his part, President Obama seems incapable of making the tough decisions that would avert a Syrian victory by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. That’s because to help salvage the Assad regime – as the preferable alternative to transforming Syria into the bedlam of “terror central” – would require cooperating with Iran and Russia, Assad’s two most important backers.

That, in turn, would infuriate the neocons, the R2Pers and the mainstream media. Obama would face a rebellion across Official Washington, where the debating points regarding “who lost Syria” are more valuable than taking realistic actions to protect vital American interests.

Obama would also have to face down both Saudi Arabia and Israel, something he does not seem capable of doing, especially as he tries to salvage an international agreement to restrict Iran’s nuclear program to peaceful purposes only – when Saudi Arabia and Israel want to enlist the U.S. military in another “regime change” war in Iran.

Indeed, the recent decision by the Saudi-Israeli alliance to go on the offensive against what it deems Iranian “proxies” is possibly the major reason why the United States is incapable of taking action to avert what may be an impending Al-Qaeda/Islamic State victory in Syria. Between Saudi Arabia’s power over finance and energy and Israel’s political and media clout, these “strange-bedfellow” allies wield enormous influence over Official Washington. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Did Money Seal Israeli-Saudi Alliance?”]

This alliance is now entangling the United States in ancient Sunni-Shiite rivalries dating back to the Seventh Century. Saudi Arabia, Israel and their many U.S. backers are gluing black hats on Shiite-ruled Iran and its allies while adjusting white hats on the Saudi royals and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has unleashed the potent Israel Lobby to get Official Washington in line.

Israel also has intensified its airstrikes inside Syria, bombing targets associated with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia which is supporting the Assad regime. Israel rationalizes these attacks as designed to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining sophisticated weaponry but the practical effect is to weaken the forces battling Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the Islamic State.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, along with Turkey and some Persian Gulf states, has stepped up support for the Sunni Islamists battling Assad’s army, thus explaining the recent surge of new recruits and improved fighting capabilities of the rebels.

Yemen’s Suffering

In another front in this Sunni-Shiite regional war, Saudi Arabia – deploying sophisticated American warplanes – continues to pummel neighboring Yemen where Houthi rebels, belonging to a Shiite offshoot, have gained control of the capital Sanaa and other major cities.

On Tuesday, Saudi jets bombed Sanaa’s airport to prevent an Iranian humanitarian aid flight from landing, but the destruction also made the runway unusable for other supplies desperately needed by the Yemeni people. While the Saudis prevented this aid from the air, the U.S. Navy has mounted what amounts to a blockade at sea, turning back nine Iranian ships last weekend because of unconfirmed suspicions that weapons might be hidden in the food and medicine.

The combination of these interdictions is creating a humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the poorest nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Navy, which likes to call itself “a global force for good,” has, in effect, been drawn into a strategy of starving the Yemeni people into submission as just more collateral damage in the Saudi war against Iranian influence.

Another consequence of the Saudi air campaign has been to boost “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” which has exploited the Saudi targeting of Houthi forces to seize more territory in Yemen’s east.

Yet, as tragic as the Yemeni situation is becoming, the more consequential crisis is emerging in Syria, where some analysts are seeing signs of a possible collapse of the Assad regime, a chief goal of the Saudi-Israeli alliance. Senior Israelis have been saying since 2013 that they would prefer a victory by Al-Qaeda over a victory by Assad.

For instance, in September 2013, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post in an interview:

“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. … We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”

He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

In June 2014, Oren expanded on this thinking at an Aspen Institute conference, extending Israel’s preference to include even the hyper-brutal Islamic State. “From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.

During Netanyahu’s March 3, 2015 speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, he also downplayed the danger from the Islamic State – with its “butcher knives, captured weapons and YouTube” – compared to Iran, which he accused of “gobbling up the nations” of the Middle East. However, Iran has not gobbled up any nations in the Middle East. It has not invaded any country for centuries. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Inventing a Record of Iranian Aggression.”]

Yet, while the Saudi-Israeli alarums about Iran may border on the hysterical, the alliance’s combined influence over Official Washington cannot be overstated. Thus, as absurd and outrageous as many of the claims are, they are not only taken seriously, they are treated as gospel. Anyone who points to the reality immediately becomes an “Iranian apologist.”

But the power of the Saudi-Israeli alliance is not simply a political curiosity or an obstacle to sensible policies. As it creates the conditions for an Al-Qaeda/Islamic State victory in Syria – and the possible reintroduction of the U.S. military into the middle of the Middle East – the Saudi-Israeli alliance has become an existential threat to the survival of the American Republic.

As the nation’s first presidents wisely recognized, there are grave dangers to a republic when it entangles itself in foreign conflicts. It’s almost always wiser to seek out realistic albeit imperfect political solutions or at least to evaluate what the negative ramifications of the military option might be before undertaking it. Otherwise, as the early presidents realized, if the country plunges into one costly conflict after another, it becomes a martial state, not a democratic republic.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon andbarnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includesAmerica’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Israeli links to Al Qaeda/ISIL now reported by corporate media by Wayne Madsen

 Israeli links to Al Qaeda/ISIL now reported by corporate media 

by Wayne Madsen

For well over a decade, WMR's editor has been reporting on the links between Israel and the terrorist group known as "Al Qaeda," particularly in reference to the attacks of 9/11. The Wall Street Journal, which has provided the government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with editorial support, recently reported that Israel has provided logistical support in Syria to Al Qaeda and its affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra. The paper reported that Al-Nusra "hasn't bothered Israel since seizing the border area last summer" along the Golan Heights. In fact, the core Al Qaeda and its official branches have never "bothered" Israel. Israel has provided medical assistance to some 2000 Syrians, a number of them members of the Nusa Front and Al Qaeda.

Recently, the leader of Lebanon's Druze Progressive Socialist Party, Walid Jumblatt, who has been an erratic on-and-off supporter of Israel, concluded an agreement with the Al Nusra Front and its Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate. Jumblatt concluded the agreement even though his fellow Druze in Idlib, Syria have been given an ultimatum by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to convert to Wahhabi Islam and destroy their shrines and mausoleums to their religious icons or face execution. Jumblatt is reported by the Lebanese press to have arranged for the forced conversions of the Idlib Druze in exchange for their lives using the offices of the United Arab Emirates.

It has also been reported in the Lebanese press that Israel has helped arrange for contacts, using Jordanian intelligence interlocutors, between Al Nusra/Al Qaeda and the Syrian Druze. Israel has offered military and intelligence support to the Syrian Druze if they attack Syrian government forces and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies in Syria.

 
The word is out on ISIL or "Daesh" -- it is made in Israel. Left: Graffiti on wall in Ma'an, Jordan.

Arab media has also reported that Iraqi Hezbollah captured three U.S.-Israeli "advisers," along with their U.S. and Israeli passports, and a fourth Israeli citizen in possession of a passport from an unnamed Persian Gulf country, at an ISIL command center in Mosul province. The ISIL command center was captured by Iraqi special forces troops in "Operation Scorpion Sting" after word reached the authorities in Baghdad that U.S. and Israeli advisers had helped set up a state-of-the-art command center in Tal Abat, in Mosul province. WMR previously reported that Iraqi troops and local Sunni tribes have witnessed Israeli commandos handing over weapons to ISIL guerrillas in Anbar province

Other Israeli fingerprints on ISIL: The Israeli press reported that gardeners in the northern Israeli city of Nazareth Illit discovered a bag containing about 25 new black-and-white ISIL flags. The discovery of the flags further implicates the Israeli government in providing not only military and logistical support to ISIL, but propaganda support, as well. Israeli picnickers on the Golan Heights amused themselves by watching through field glasses and telescopes ISIL/Al Nusra rebels battling Syrian army units from the Golan highlands. Never once were the Israelis Israelis concerned about receiving fire from ISIL/Al Nusra positions. Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu revealed that Turkish authorities arrested a foreign intelligence agent, believed to be an asset of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), who was charged with helping three British schoolgirls travel from Britain through Turkey and then into Syria to join ISIL. Under the Stephen Harper government, Canadian intelligence has been ordered to assist Mossad in all matters requested by the Israelis. The arrested agent is Mohammed Mehmet Rashid, aka "Doctor Mehmet Rashid," Mohammed al Rashid, and Mohammad Al Rashed, who reported to Bruno Saccomani, the Canadian ambassador to Jordan and Iraq and a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer who was the head of Harper’s personal security detail until he was appointed ambassador to Amman. Saccomani was criticized by other RCMP officers for his "bullying" tactics. The appointment was roundly criticized by the Canadian opposition because Saccomani had no diplomatic experience. Al Rashid met the three British school girls at Gaziantep near the Syrian border and personally delivered them into ISIL hands in Syria. Saccomani served as the RCMP liaison officer at the Canadian embassy in Rome in 1997 where he developed a close working relationship with Israeli intelligence and law enforcement officials. Russian President Vladimir Putin's aide Alexander Prokhanov charged last December that Mossad was training ISIL's leadership. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that British and U.S. intelligence and Mossad worked together to create ISIL in an operation dubbed "Hornet's Nest." News reports from around the Middle East revealed that Abu Bakr Al Baghdad, the self-proclaimed ISIL "caliph" who was photographed in Syria with visiting U.S. Senator John McCain. received a year oif intensive language and Islamic theology training from Mossad handlers. Adrian Kaba, who represents Sweden's ruling Social Democratic Party on the Malmo City Council and the regional government, wrote in 2014 that Mossad provided training to ISIL. Kaba wrote on his Facebook page that “ISIS is being trained by the Israeli Mossad. Muslims are not waging war, they are being used as pawns by other peoples’ game." Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested ISIL-style beheadings for Israeli Arabs suspected of supporting terrorism.             One would think that committed Islamist jihadis would know in what direction to pray to Mecca for photo ops like those above. These photos are yet another example of the artificial Israeli and Western intelligence construct of ISIL.

The Future Gaddafi Foresaw Libya, ISIS and the Unaffordable Luxury of Hindsight

The Future Gaddafi Foresaw
Libya, ISIS and the Unaffordable Luxury of Hindsight

By Ahmad Barqawi

March 09, 2015 "ICH" - "Counterpunch"

- Who are you?” the late Muammar Gaddafi once rhetorically asked in a famous speech of his towards the end of his reign; (rightly) questioning the legitimacy of those seeking to over-throw his government at the time, calling them extremists, foreign agents, rats and drug-addicts. He was laughed at, unfairly caricatured, ridiculed and incessantly demonized; a distasteful parody video poking fun at the late Libyan leader even went viral on social media; evidently the maker of the video, an Israeli, thought the Libyan colloquial Arabic word “Zenga” (which means an Alleyway) sounded funny enough that he extracted it from one of Gaddafi’s speeches, looped it on top of a hip-hop backing track and voila… he got himself a hit video which was widely (and shamefully) circulated with a “revolutionary” zeal in the Arab world. We shared, we laughed, he died.

But the bloody joke is on all of us; Gaddafi knew what he was talking about; right from the get-go, he accused the so-called Libyan rebels of being influenced by Al-Qaeda ideology and Ben Laden’s school of thought; no one had taken his word for it of course, not even a little bit. I mean why should we have? After all, wasn’t he a vile, sex-centric dictator hell-bent on massacring half of the Libyan population while subjecting the other half to manic raping sprees with the aid of his trusted army of Viagra-gobbling, sub-Saharan mercenaries? At least that’s what we got from the visual cancer that is Al Jazeera channel and its even more acrid Saudi counterpart Al-Arabiya in their heavily skewed coverage of NATO’s vicious conquest of Libya. Plus Gaddafi did dress funny; why would anyone trust a haggard, weird-looking despot dressed in colorful rags when you have well-groomed Zionists like Bernard Henry Levy, John McCain and Hillary Clinton at your side, smiling and flashing the victory sign in group photo-ops, right?

Gaddafi called them drug-addicted, Islamic fundamentalists; we know them as ISIS… it doesn’t seem much of a joke now, does it? And ISIS is what had been in store for us all along; the “revolutionary” lynching and sodomization of Muammar Gaddafi amid manic chants of “Allahu Akbar”, lauded by many at the time as some sort of a warped triumph of the good of popular will (read: NATO-sponsored mob rule) over the evil of dictatorship (sovereign state), was nothing but a gory precursor for the future of the country and the region; mass lynching of entire populations in Libya, Syria and Iraq and the breakup of key Arab states into feuding mini-statelets. The gruesome video of Colonel Gaddafi’s murder, which puts to shame the majority of ISIS videos in terms of unhinged brutality and gore, did not invoke the merest of condemnations back then, on the contrary; everyone seemed perfectly fine with the grotesque end of the Libyan “tyrant”… except that it was only the beginning of a new and unprecedented reign of terror courtesy of NATO’s foot-soldiers and GCC-backed Islamic insurgents.

The rapid proliferation of trigger-happy terrorist groups and Jihadi factions drenched in petrodollars in Libya was not some sort of an intelligence failure on the part of western governments or a mere by-product of the power vacuum left by a slain Gaddafi; it was a deliberate, calculated policy sought after and implemented by NATO and its allies in the Gulf under the cringe-inducing moniker “Friends of Libya” (currently known as the International Coalition against ISIS) to turn the north-African country into the world’s largest ungovernable dumpster of weapons, al-Qaida militants and illegal oil trading.

So it is safe to say that UNSC resolution 1973, which practically gave free rein for NATO to bomb Libya into smithereens, has finally borne fruit… and it’s rotten to its nucleus, you can call the latest gruesome murder of 21 Egyptian fishermen and workers by the Libyan branch of the Islamic State exhibit “A”, not to mention of course the myriad of daily killings, bombings and mini-civil wars that are now dotting the entire country which, ever since the West engineered its coup-d’etat against the Gaddafi government, have become synonymous with the bleak landscape of lawlessness and death that is “Libya” today. And the gift of NATO liberation is sure to keep on giving for years of instability and chaos to come.

In an interview with the western media misinformation collective that is the BBC, ABC and the Sunday Times in February 2011; the late Muammar Gaddafi told his condescending interviewers; “have you seen the Al Qaeda operatives? Have you heard all these Jihadi broadcasts? It is Al Qaeda that is controlling the cities of Al Baida and Darnah, former Guantanamo inmates and extremists unleashed by America to terrorize the Libyan people…”. Darnah is now the main stronghold for ISIS in Libya.

In a bizarre coincidence (or some sort of cosmic irony); the date on which ISIS chose to release its video of the beheading of Egyptian captives, thereby officially declaring its presence in the war-torn country with three oil fields under its control, (appropriately) marked the 4th anniversary of the start of the so-called Libyan revolution on February 15^th, 2011; a more apt “tribute” to commemorate the Western instigated regime-change debacle in Libya could not have been made.

But even long before ISIS became the buzzword, the acrid nature of a “revolutionary” Libya showed in full, sickening splendor almost instantly right after the old regime fell, everything the late Gaddafi was falsely accused of doing was literally perfected to a chilling degree by the so-called rebels; massacres, indiscriminate shelling of residential areas, car-bombings, mass arrests, torture, theft of oil and national resources… the whole lot. In 2013; two British pro-Palestine activists, on their way to Gaza with an aid convoy, got to experience first-hand the rotten fruits of the Libyan chapter of the so-called Arab Spring when they were abducted by a motely crew of Libyan revolutionaries-turned-warlords in the city of Benghazi and gang raped in front of their father.

Proponents of Humanitarian Interventions must be patting themselves on the back these days; now that Libya has completed its democratic makeover from a country with the highest standard of living in Africa under Gaddafi’s rule into a textbook definition of a failed state; a godless wasteland of religious fanaticism, internal bloodletting and wholesale head-chopping, in fact Libya became so “democratic” that there are now two parliaments and two (warring) governments; each with its own (criminal) army and supported with money and caches of weapons from competing foreign powers, not to mention the myriad of secessionist movements and militias which the illegal coup against Gaddafi has spawned all over the country while free health care, education and electricity, which the Libyans took for granted under Gaddafi’s regime, are all now but relics of the past; that’s the “Odyssey Dawn” the Libyans were promised; a sanitized version of Iraq sans the public outrage, neatly re-packaged in a “responsibility to protect” caveat and delivered via aerial bombing campaigns where even the West’s overzealous Gulf Co-conspirators Club (GCC), driven by nothing beyond petty personal vendettas against Gaddafi, got to test the lethality of its rusted, American-made military aircrafts alongside NATO on the people of Tripoli and Sirte.

This is what Gaddafi had predicted right from the get-go and then some; the ephemeral euphoria of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions was just too potent and too exhilarating for us to read the fine print; was it a conspiracy or a true revolutionary spirit gone awry? It doesn’t really matter now that ISIS has become the true legacy of Tahrir Square; “they will turn Libya into another Afghanistan, another Somalia, another Iraq… your women won’t be allowed out, they will transform Libya into an Islamic Emirate and America will bomb the country under the pretext of fighting terrorism”, the late Libyan leader had said in a televised speech on February 22^nd, 2011, and more prophetic words were never spoken.

America’s “clean war” Libyan prototype proved to be such a success that it was replicated with a wanton abandon in Syria; Paul Bremer’s “Blackwater” death squads of old, which reigned terror all over Iraq, are back… with an Islamic twist; bearded, clad in black and explosives from head to toe and mounting convoys of Toyota Land Cruiser trucks with an ever-expanding, seemingly borderless Islamic Caliphate (that somehow leaves the Zionist regime unencumbered in its occupation of Palestine) set in their sights.

Everyday the Arab World is awakened to a new-videotaped atrocity; steeped in gore and maniacal terror courtesy of ISIS (or IS or ISIL), and countless of other “youtubeless”, albeit more heinous crimes courtesy of America’s very own ever-grinding, one-sided drone warfare; the entire region seesaws between machete beheadings and hellfire missile incinerations. Death from above… as well as below; the War on Terror rears its ugly head once again; to bring in line those nasty terrorists that the West itself funded and sponsored in the name of democracy to destabilize “unsavory” regimes; an unrelenting Groundhog Day that starts with the Responsibility to Protect and ends with the War on Terror, with thousands of innocent lives, typically chalked up to collateral damage, crushed in the process.

This is exactly what Gaddafi foresaw; a Libya mired in utter chaos, civil conflict and western diktats; a breeding ground for Jihadi fundamentalism and extremists… too bad we just laughed his warnings off to an Israeli-made parody tune.

Ahmad Barqawi, freelance columnist and writer.

"White Widow's" death in Ukraine proves ISIL-Kiev alliance by Wayne Madsen

"White Widow's" death in Ukraine proves ISIL-Kiev alliance

The recent killing by a Russian "volunteer" sniper of the so-called "White Widow," aka Samantha Lewthwaite, while she was fighting against Russian-speaking forces in eastern Ukraine, is the best evidence yet of Islamic State collusion with the Kiev government and Zionist Ukrainian tycoons like Ihor Kolomoisky. Lewthwaite was reportedly killed by Russian forces some two weeks ago in the eastern Ukrainian region of Lugansk.

Lewthwaite was serving as a sniper with the Aidar Battalion, which receives support from Kolomoisky, the billionaire Ukrainian-Israeli dual national governor of Dnipropetrovsk. Kolomoisky provides money and logistical support to several pro-Kiev paramilitary units. They include, in addition to the Aidar Battalion, "Blue Helmet" ex-Israeli Defense Force commandos,  the Azov Battalion, the Donbass Battalion, and the 2,000-strong Dniepr-1 (or Dnipro-1) Battalion. A number of neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists from the west of the country serve with the battalions in the east.

The white Northern Ireland-born Lewthwaite was the widow of one of the accused London transit bombers, Jermain Lindsey, hence her nickname "White Widow." Lewthwaite disappeared from England a few months after the 2005 London bombings. She surfaced again as the alleged commander of the Al-Shabaab-linked terrorist commando team that attacked the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in 2013, an attack that saw over 60 civilians killed. Lewthwaite's death at the hands of eastern Ukrainian Russians was reported by Moscow's Regnum news agency to have been "slow and painful."

Lewthwaite's death while fighting with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) forces in eastern Ukraine verifies reports WMR received in Iran that Ukraine was assisting ISIL forces in Syria. In September it was reported that Lewthwaite was in Syria helping ISIL volunteers train for suicide attacks. In turn, many Chechen members of ISIL traveled freely between Syria/Iraq and Ukraine through Turkey to fight against Russian-speaking forces in eastern Ukraine.

A recent phone call from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Russian President Vladimir Putin developed into a shouting match after Erdogan asked Putin to stop assisting the Bashar al Assad government in Syria. Putin, in response, accused Erdogan of facilitating the transit of ISIL guerrillas between the Middle East and Ukraine, many of them Chechen Islamist radicals wanted by Moscow for terrorist attacks in Russia. The killing of Lewthwaite by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine largely proved Putin's assertion of Ukrainian complicity with ISIL. Russian SVR intelligence, through agents associated with the autonomous Russian republic of Tatarstan who work in Turkey, may have been aware of Lewthwaite's transit to eastern Ukraine via Turkey after fighting with ISIL forces in Syria and/or Iraq. Lewthwaite reportedly received plastic surgery after the Nairobi attack to avoid capture.

After the attack, Lewthwaite escaped from Kenya on a South African passport. Lewthwaite was reported to have been killed in 2013 in Somalia during fighting between two factions of Al-Shabaab.


Lewthwaite's South African passport. Was it courtesy of Mossad's passport-alteration bucket shops?

The mere fact that Lewthwaite and her ISIL comrades were caught fighting in eastern Ukraine alongside Israeli, Ukrainian Jewish, and neo-Nazi western Ukrainians on behalf of the Kiev regime, represents additional proof of Tel Aviv's involvement with ISIL. A recent audio tape purporting to be a call by ISIL "caliph" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi for ISIL to "erupt volcanoes of jihad everywhere" originated from the Mossad-funded and Washington-based Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) group run by Rita Katz, a well-known Mossad operative. SITE is infamous for releasing unverified video and audio tapes from such Al Qaeda leaders as Osama bin Laden; Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri; and Adam Gadahn, aka Adam Pearlman, whose grandfather, Carl Pearlman, was a member of the board of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

The Zionist-owned media, which includes BuzzFeed, immediately called the story of Lewthwaite's killing in Ukraine a "fake story." Any news report that interferes with the Zionist-conceived "pseudo-reality" routinely sold to an unsuspecting world is always called fake by the Zionist media. BuzzFeed was funded by money from Ben Horowitz, the son of the king of neo-conservative political correctness on college campuses, David Horowitz. Ben Horowitz, a wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is a major funder of the American Jewish World Service.

THE ROVING EYE - Lame-duck Obama's brave new world By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Lame-duck Obama's brave new world By Pepe Escobar Fresh out of his latest Congressional election shellacking delivered by the minority who bothered to vote in the United States, the formerly most powerful leader in the world, US President Barack Obama, will star in a thriller this weekend, appearing in the same room with China's Xi Jinping, Japan's Shinzo Abe and - fasten your seat belts - Russia's Vladimir Putin. What a drag - the Bomber-In-Chief must be musing. The global economy is mostly a disaster. China, even growing at "only" 7% a year, keeps eroding his "indispensable nation" aura. Japan has decided to copy the Federal Reserve and embark on its own kamikaze version of quantitative easing. Numerous Southeast Asian nations keep freaking out about a few rocks in the South China Sea. And last but not least, Obama's nemesis, pesky Vlad "the Hammer" Putin, has just been crowned Most Powerful Leader in the world - even if for the most stupid reasons ("unpredictable" head of a "rogue state") [1] - while he, the Nobel Peace Prize leader of the exceptionalist, indispensable nation, is now nothing but a pitiful lame duck. The get-together, extended to Monday and Tuesday, will be the highlight of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Beijing - actually, outside of Beijing, so presumably unpolluted blue skies may also have a chance at the photo op. This is APEC's 25th birthday. And the 20th birthday of the Indonesian summit in Bogor - I happened to be there - which, under Bill Clinton's flowery charm, set the 21-member APEC nations a goal of "free" and open trade and investment by 2020. "Free" as in US corporations dictating the rules, of course. What the whole planet really wants to know about APEC is whether The Lame Duck with meet The Bear face to face, one on one. The White House remains mum. The Kremlin did not rule it out. Well, there's always Plan B: the Group of 20 summit on November 15-16 in Brisbane, Australia. What the whole planet already knows is that the new slimy show premiering on Capitol Hill on January 2015 has a top priority: the Republicans will do everything in their power to make the lame duck cry for mercy over and over again. So what will this mean in terms of Obama's self-styled "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" foreign policy doctrine, which that 2016 juggernaut known as "The Hillarator" has already derided as a "non-organizational principle"? Just extra layers of cosmic stupidity, or something more substantial? That old axis of evil Let's start with The Caliph, aka Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Obama already said, after his shellacking, he is going to seek Congressional authorization for his coalition of the cowards bombing IS - aka Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Daesh, the jiahdi outfit's Arabic acronym Now that's not a dumb move. If Republican-ruled Congress says "yes", they will be responsible for the fiasco (and it's already a fiasco). If they say "no", the fiasco can be attributed to their irresponsibility. Republicans are immersed in their own internal split - the boots-on-the-ground favored by the establishment against the non-interventionist Tea Party. So in the end, the lame duck may profit from it after all. Iran is a much dicier proposition. It all depends on a nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) being reached in a little over two weeks, on November 24. That's a taller-than-the-Himalayas order, although feasible. The Obama administration is desperate for a deal - as the leak of a "secret letter" from Obama to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei attests. But a deal under Washington's terms, which for Tehran is unacceptable. [2] The new US Senate only takes over in January. Obama has already stressed he won't ask the Senate to ratify the deal. Once again, the problem is what deal? Obama's idea of a grand design in the Middle East is to use a "responsible" - according to US standards - Tehran to balance the Sunni-Shi'ite divide and get rid of the current proxy wars, the whole thing arbitrated by Washington. This is a pipe dream. But it's what the lame duck wants. Needless to say, Republicans - for whom Tehran never left the "axis of evil" - will try to bomb the dream, pipelines and all, for instance by passing legislation preventing the lifting of key sanctions. Sparks will fly. Tehran won't accept a nuclear deal where Washington just says "take my word for it, we will lift sanctions"; this has to be in the letter of the agreement. After all they have vast experience of dealing with gun-crazy Republicans in power. Nothing will change on Russia - even as the Obama administration needs Moscow to get a deal with Tehran. The relentless demonization of Putin and the resurgence of the same old Cold War meme, "The Russians are Coming", are guaranteed to keep propelling stupidity 24/7 to intergalactic spheres. Capitol Hill will go on overdrive. After all, Russia demonization is a bipartisan sport in Washington. The only "solution" would be regime change. Not only is Putin not going anywhere, but he's ratcheting up his defiance of the Empire of Chaos. This implies increased problems with Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel keeps appeasing the Americans while German businesses want increased trade with Russia and Eurasia as a whole. Another China win-win?  On trade, here's where APEC collides with the two-pronged US version of an economic NATO: the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with Asia. What the Obama administration is fighting for is nothing less than a totally unregulated global marketplace. Imagine the "free" market - as Bill "Bubba" Clinton was already parading in Indonesia two decades ago - setting all sorts of standards on everything from working conditions to the environment. In theory, that's exactly what Republicans love. So here Obama would be right in their alley, which implies an easy Senate ratification. It's actually way more complicated. Republicans simply cannot stomach an Obama victory. That means this upcoming Senate won't give him the fast track he needs to clinch the TPP deal. That happens to be exactly what China wants. Beijing will use APEC to promote the road map for its own, anti-TPP trade deal, the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP). TPP involves 12 APEC members - but not China. And even inside TPP there's a monster revolt; Tokyo is battling the US because they Japan is sure its auto industry and agriculture may be devoured by US corporations. So we're right into a titanic Transformer-style Battle of the Deals. In fact any deal is problematic, as China, Japan and South Korea may want, in principle, broader economic cooperation. But on trade, in so many levels, they are fiercely competing against each other - as in the auto industry and agriculture, for instance - not to mention that heavy historical baggage between Japan and China and Japan and South Korea. The Chinese charm offensive at APEC in Beijing is all about "innovative development", "building infrastructure investment" and "comprehensive connectivity". It's all a mirror image of the extremely ambitious New Silk Roads proposed by President Xi to connect Eurasia. Beijing is proposing a new "connectivity framework" into three key areas - "physical connectivity, institutional connectivity, and people-to-people connectivity". But still no one knows how this will work out in practice towards Asia integration. Washington doesn't care; it just wants a "free" unregulated mega-market for US corporations. Beijing sees Asian economic integration as APEC facilitating an FTAAP by 2025. Needless to say, the US and a few vassals aboard the TPP have been adamant that no regional deal jeopardizes TPP. Washington was betting on TPP being signed before APEC. It didn't happen. So Plan B is to boycott FTAAP until TPP is signed. And that Beijing won't allow. The lame duck will have to duck a lot on his one-on-one with Xi in Beijing. Finally, what about the Obama-Capitol Hill battle on the climate-change field? For the absolute majority of Republicans, climate change and global warming are nothing but an evil conspiracy. End of story. The lame duck and Capitol Hill at least may agree on - what else - the Global War on Terror. Pentagon supremo Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently said the US should get ready for endless wars, as "tyranny", "terrorism", national security challenges and - surprise! - climate change pose a substantial "threat". Since 2002, the Pentagon has been saying to anyone who was bothered to listen that Endless War is the only deal in town - or the universe, for that matter. The lame duck might even fraternize about it with his Republican nemeses over the odd round of golf. What a wonderful (lame duck) world this would be. Notes: 1. Putin Vs. Obama: The World's Most Powerful People 2014, Forbes, November 5, 2014. 2. Obama Wrote Secret Letter to Iran's Khamenei About Fighting Islamic State, Wall Street Journal Online (subscription). Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

ISIL/ISIS: Another contrivance brought to you by Mossad, MI6, and the CIA - Part III McCain's consorting with terrorists exposed by Wayne Madsen

 ISIL/ISIS: Another contrivance brought to you by Mossad, MI6, and the CIA - Part III

McCain's consorting with terrorists exposed
WMR's knowledgeable sources have revealed the extent of Senator John McCain's links to the terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham [not Syria, as falsely reported by the corporate media] and the "Islamic State."


McCain's Middle East adviser Elizabeth O'Bagy, who falsely claimed to have had a PhD from Georgetown University, accompanied McCain on an unofficial trip to Syria last year where the two met with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi [circled in red at right] and Mohammed Nour of the Northern Storm Brigade of the ISIL-linked Al Nusra Front [circled in red at far right]. Standing next to Salim Idriss, the former head of the Supreme Military Council of the "Free Syrian Army" who now lives in exile in Doha, Qatar, is O'Bagy, wearing a head scarf and pink sweater.

WMR has learned that when McCain met with Nour, the Northern Storm Brigade had already kidnapped Shi'a pilgrims in Syria, as well as a Lebanese journalist. Had any other Americans met with documented terrorists such as Nour and al-Baghdadi, unlike McCain and O'Bagy, they would have been arrested and charged with aiding and abetting a terrorist group. Several Americans are now serving long prison terms for doing much less than McCain and O'Bagy and were entrapped in FBI sting operations merely because they were Muslims.

At the time O'Bagy accompanied McCain to Syria to meet in Bab Salama with the chief of ISIL and other terrorist leaders, including 20 Syrian rebel brigade commanders representing Al Nusra and the nascent ISIL, O'Bagy worked for Kimberly Kagan, the wife of arch-neocon Zionist Frederick Kagan of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and sister-in-law of Robert Kagan, a resident neocon scholar at the Brookings Institution, and his wife, Victoria Nuland, the neocon Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department. Nuland was primarily responsible for funding and coordinating the coup in Ukraine that resulted in a bloody civil war between Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine and the Nazi- and Zionist-dominated central and western Ukraine.

O'Bagy and McCain have been at the center of neocon intrigue within the Obama administration. In fact, the neocons never lost their influence inside the State Department and the National Security Council after the George W. Bush administration. In some cases, their influence increased under Barack Obama.

Working under Kimberly Kagan, O'Bagy was the Syria analyst in the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), another neocon operation in Washington that has had undue influence over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. After it was disclosed that she committed resumé fraud by falsely claiming to have a PhD from Georgetown, O'Bagy was officially "fired" by ISW but continued on as the Political Director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) NGO, a George Soros-like nonprofit that seeks donations from other NGOs, including the neocon Freedom House and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. SETF admitted to having "sub-contracts with the U.S. and British governments to provide aid to the Syrian opposition." O'Bagy also served as a legislative assistant to McCain. The SETF is an extreme anti-Bashar al-Assad organization that has used Pentagon-grade psychological warfare tactics to demonize the Assad government and falsely blame him for atrocities carried out by Syrian rebels, including sarin and chlorine gas attacks in Syria.
O'Bagy's operations security (OPSEC) left something to be desired as she voraciously sent out Twitter messages during her clandestine visit to Syria with McCain in 2013. After the visit was publicized, O'Bagy deleted her Twitter messages but WMR was provided copies of them by a knowledgeable source.

O'Bagy is most infamous for writing an August 30, 2013 Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal that was cited by both McCain and Secretary of State John Kerry. The article, titled "On the Front Lines of Syria’s Civil War," was cited by McCain during a Senate hearing as "an important op-ed by Dr. Elizabeth O’Bagy." Kerry also cited the article in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, calling it a "very interesting article."

In the article, O'Bagy, who claimed to have made a number of trips to Syria to liaise with Syrian rebels, falsely stated that Syrian "moderates" led the fight against the Syrian government. The Op-Ed called for the United States to provide "sophisticated weaponry" to the rebels and enter the civil war militarily. Obama refused to follow this advice, a decision that earned him the scorn of McCain and other neocons. McCain continues to suggest that the Syrian "moderate" rebels have a chance to seize control of Syria, an indication that he continues to fall under the spell of O'Bagy and her neocon associates.

In the Tweets, O'Bagy takes responsibility for everything from McCain's attire in Syria to the individuals with whom he met. We now know that these individuals included al-Baghdadi and Nour, as well as other terrorist commanders. O'Bagy also is at pains to distance her Syrian rebel allies from Abu Sakkar, aka Khalid bin Hamad, the rebel commander who was filmed eating the heart of a Syrian soldier. O'Bagy denies that Abu Sakkar was a member of the Free Syrian Army's Homs-based Farooq Brigages, but independent news reports stated that he was a commander of the Farooq Brigades. O'Bagy misidentified bin Hamad as Faraouq Mustaqila, a familiar tactic of the neocons and no surprise from an individual who lied about having a PhD.

ISIL and the Saudis, Qataris, and Israelis

WMR has also learned that ISIL/Al Nusra is enriching itself from ransom payments for hostages being received mostly from Qatar, a member of Obama's newly-formed "coalition" to fight ISIL. The most recent ransom paid by Qatar to ISIL was for 45 Fijian peacekeepers captured by ISIL's Al Nusra allies in the Golan region of Syria bordering Israel. Qatar also paid ransom payments to Al Nusra-ISIL units for some Syrian nuns and captured Lebanese Army soldiers. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is, under Obama's "coalition," training so-called Free Syrian Army "moderates" to fight ISIL/Al Nusra and the Assad government. In the past,  the Saudis have conducted such training to radicalize Sunni Muslim volunteers for the Syrian civil war and funnel them to ISIL units in Syria and Iraq.

Israel has been transporting Al Nusra/ISIL terrorists across the Golan frontier into Israel, ostensibly for medical treatment,  but also, as reported exclusively to WMR, for intelligence and other military training. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's recent Twitter statement that "Hamas is ISIS" has much truth. Israel's Mossad originally created Hamas as a more radical foil for Fatah, the largest group in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Israel now likens ISIS/ISIL, which it has supported, to its other creation, Hamas.

ISIL/ISIS: Another contrivance brought to you by Mossad, MI6, and the CIA - Part I by Wayne Madsen

ISIL/ISIS: Another contrivance brought to you by Mossad, MI6, and the CIA - Part I

First of a Two-Part Series

From AQI to ISIL
As President Barack Obama prepares to announce what could be a long and drawn-out U.S. military strategy to defeat the Islamic State jihadists who have seized control of large portions of Syria and Iraq, it is important to highlight the roots of this organization. The insurgents, who are considered more dangerous than Al Qaeda by many Pentagon and U.S. intelligence specialists, have disturbing links to intelligence services of the United States, Israel, and Britain.

The deeper one digs into the operations surrounding the "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" (ISIL), or, as it is variably called, "Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham" (ISIS), "Al Dawlah" (the State), or "Da'ish" (a concatenation of"al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham", the more the Islamist insurgent group's links to Western and Israeli intelligence are revealed. ISIL is  an outgrowth of the Organization of Jihad's Base in the Country of the Two Rivers or Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. As with the current leader of ISIL, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, questions surrounded the background of Zarqawi.

Zarqawi's real name was Ahmed Fadeel Nazal al-Khalayleh. He was born in the Jordanian town of Zarqa. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was an alias as much as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is an alias today for the leader of ISIL. Al Baghdadi, a native of Samarra, Iraq, is actually Ibrahim ibn Awwad ibn Ibrahim ibn Ali ibn Muhammad al-Badri al-Samarrai. Before he joined the mujaheddin war against the Soviets, Zarqawi was known as a drunk and drug abuser, hardly material for the fundamentalist Islamists bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claimed by some Middle East sources to be a Mossad agent, with beard [left] and with unidentified woman [right]. Some reports claim that al-Baghdadi is an Israeli Jewish Mossad agent named Elliot Shimon. If true, it goes a long way to explain why John McCain and his staff, which is thoroughly penetrated by agents-of-influence for Israel, felt secure in arranging a meeting between the Arizona senator and, reputedly, the head of a group deemed more radical and "anti-American" than Al Qaeda.

Zarqawi proclaimed himself the "Emir of Al Qaeda in the Country of the Two Rivers" and he quickly became public enemy number one for U.S. occupation forces. Zarqawi was recruited in Jordan by "The Base" or "Al Qaeda" to serve in the ranks of Arab legions fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. As the late British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook pointed out, "The Base" or "Al Qaeda" was a Central Intelligence Agency database containing the names of various CIA recruiters, financiers, exporters, and other personnel required to maintain the flow of mercenaries, weapons, and money to Afghanistan and Pakistan to sustain the campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was also known to the CIA by his agency cover name "Tim Osman," and by his Arab Afghani volunteers as "the Hero of Jaji," a battle in which Bin Laden was victorious against the Soviets. Bin Laden ran the Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - for the CIA and Saudis. MAK ensured the flow of fighters, money, and weapons to the Afghan insurgency on behalf of the CIA's Al Qaeda base.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, Zarqawi, who befriended Bin Laden, returned to Jordan but was jailed by the authorities for setting upJund al-Sham, a "caliphate" liberation movement with the goal of establishing an Islamist state in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Cyprus, and southern Turkey. It turned out that Junda al-Sham was thoroughly infiltrated by Jordanian intelligence, which informed the CIA about all the group's members. Zarqawi was released by Jordan in 2001. He traveled to Afghanistan to battle against the U.S. occupation forces there and he eventually found his way into Iraq where he organized jihadists for the forthcoming U.S. invasion. CIA "evidence" that Zarqawi was in Iraq was used to justify the 2003 U.S. invasion of the country. Jordanian intelligence and the CIA also had evidence that Zarqawi was involved in the 2005 bombings in Amman of the Radisson SAS Hotel, the Grand Hyatt, and the Days Inn. The attacks were used by Jordan and the U.S. to beef up America's military presence in the country.

Beginning in 2003, Zarqawi was accused of carrying out a number of terrorist attacks against Western interests inside Iraq, as well as in Casablanca, Madrid, and Istanbul. Zarqawi's base of operations in Iraq was in the northern Kurdistan region, in the area now claimed by ISIL and Baghdadi. In May 2004, AQI released a video in which American Nick Berg was claimed by the CIA to have been beheaded by a masked Zarqawi. The video allegedly posted by AQI was "found" on the Internet by the Washington, DC-based Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute or "SITE," run by Rita Katz, an individual with close ties to Israel's Mossad. The Berg beheading was the only video said to have been made by Zarqawi. Zarqawi's other media releases in which he issued threats against the West were audio recordings. Although the CIA stated that it confirmed Zarqawi's voice on the Berg beheading video there were no independent verifications of Zarqawi's voice being on either the videotape or the various audio recordings.

Zarqawi's exploits in Iraq were hyped further after he was said to have personally beheaded in September 2004 American contractor Owen Eugene Armstrong, an employee of Gulf Supplies Commercial Services of the United Arab Emirates and the beheading of British engineer Ken Bigley in October 2004; ordered the 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan and the bombing in August 2003 of the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, the headquarters of the United Nations, which killed the UN Secretary General's special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 other people. Zarqawi became the name the U.S. associated with almost every Sunni terrorist attack in Iraq, including the 2006 bombing of the Shi'a al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, Shi'a shrines in Karbala and Najaf, and thousands of killings of Iraqi civilians. A document later found in one of Zarqawi's Iraq safe houses revealed plans for him to goad the U.S. into attacking Iran. Such a plan would have fit in nicely with Israel's long range goals.

In his February 5, 2003 address to the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who lied about Iraq possessing biological weapons of mass destruction and mobile bio-warfare laboratories, also stated that Saddam Hussein was linked to Zarqawi. Iraq's intelligence service later stated that it could not even locate Zarqawi in Iraq. If Saddam had captured Zarqawi he would have, at the very least, offered him up to Jordanian intelligence, which Powell indicated the U.S. had contacted in order to see Zarqawi extradited by Iraq to the United States. However, Zarqawi was as much a threat to Saddam as he was to the U.S. or Jordan, so had Saddam captured the jihadist leader, he would have likely been tortured for information and then executed on the spot and on Saddam's personal orders.

In the 2006 Senate Report on Prewar Intelligence, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded: "Postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi." It turned out that the "intelligence" linking Zarqawi to Saddam had emanated from the Pentagon's notorious Mossad mole, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and Plans Douglas Feith, who leaked the information in a classified memorandum to Stephen Hayes, the columnist for the neo-conservative Weekly Standard.

Zarqawi: The man and the myth

Some U.S. intelligence sources claimed that Zarqawi was a "myth" invented by the neocons to justify continued U.S. military operations in Iraq. Iraqi Sunni and Shi'a leaders rarely agree, however, a Sunni insurgent leader told The Daily Telegraph that he believed that Zarqawi was an American or Israeli agent and Iraqi Shi'a leader Muqtada al Sadr claimed that Zarqawi was a fake takfir (a Muslim who declares that other Muslims, such as the Shia's, are heretics) in the employment of the United States. Shi'a imamSheikh Jawad Al-Khalessi repeated that accusation that Zarqawi was a myth in 2005. According to The Washington Post, General Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. Central Command's chief public affairs officer in Iraq stated in a 2004 internal CENTCOM briefing that "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."

The Afghan Northern Alliance claimed that Zarqawi was killed in a 2002 missile attack in Afghanistan. There were a number of reports of Zarqawi having been killed by either U.S. missiles or bombs in 2003. Some reports claimed that Zarqawi had lost a leg in Afghan combat operations. Other reports said he had both of his legs. The "Zarqawi" in the Berg beheading video had both legs and an autopsy X-ray of the person said to have been Zarqawi and who was reportedly killed in a 2006 U.S. air strike showed a fracture to the lower right leg said to have been lost in Afghanistan.

Zarqawi was captured in Iraq by coalition forces in 2004 but released. The explanation given at the time was that the Iraqis and Americans failed to recognize America's public enemy number one in Iraq. Zarqawi's eventual successor as the head of AQI, al-Baghdadi, was also captured by U.S.  forces in in Iraq in 2004 and held at Camp Bucca from February to December 2004 before being released. Al-Baghdadi took over the AQI operation in May 2010 after his predecessor Abu Omar al-Qurashi al-Baghdadi, actual name Hamid Dawud Mohamed Khalil al Zawi, was killed in a U.S.-Iraqi rocket attack. In 2007, Bin Laden intermediary Khaled al-Mashhadani claimed Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the predecessor to the current ISIL chief, was a fictional character designed by the West and Iraq's government to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-led insurgency. Mashhadani said audio statements attributed to Abu Omar were being read by an Iraqi actor. The Abu Omar recordings were all released by the SITE Institute.

U.S. forces claimed they killed Zarqawi near Baqubah, Iraq in a June 7, 2006 targeted killing by two precision-guided bombs.

Enter Al-Baghdadi II

While Zarqawi was hyped as one of America's most dangerous enemies, the man who eventually succeeded him as the head of ISIL in Syria, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, became one of America's trusted allies. Al-Baghdadi, along with the leaders of the Al Nusra Front, initially placed their forces under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army. In May 2013, U.S. Senator John McCain, a chief water carrier for the neocon interventionists and Israeli interests, covertly met with Syrian rebel leaders after crossing into rebel-held Syrian territory from Turkey. McCain was accompanied by General Salem Idris, the head of the Free Syrian Army's Supreme Military Council, as he met with the commanders of a number of Syrian rebel units. One of these rebel commanders was none other than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the current head of ISIL. McCain's office has denied that Al-Baghdadi was present at the meetings but photographic evidence of the ISIL chief's meeting with McCain and the U.S.-supported Free Syrian Army officials is overwhelming.
  
Senator McCain with America's "allies" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi [circled in photo at left, seated, and in photo at right, standing behind McCain's right shoulder], the head of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and Mohammed Nour [circled, photo at right, standing far right], the head of the Northern Storm Brigade of the Al-Nusra Front. Suggestions by Western intelligence of a break between ISIL and Al-Nusra are false. After achieving its battlefield success, Al Nusra swore allegiance to Al-Baghdadi and ISIL. Israel has a working relationship with the combined insurgent forces in the Golan area and in other parts of Syria, as well as in Lebanon where ISIL and Mossad jointly target Hezbollah forces.
America's response to ISIL's threat to turn Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and other countries into an Islamic Caliphate are as perplexing as American indifference over proclaimed caliphates by initially U.S.-supported Islamist radicals in Libya and by Boko Haram in Nigeria and Ansar Dine in Mali. The lackadaisical attitude by the CIA and the White House over these groups, which kidnap, rape, torture, burn, bomb, and behead their way into international headlines is exactly what would be expected from a scenario in which radical Islamist groups were created by the CIA, Mossad, and MI-6 to create permanent conflict situations between the West and Islam and between Muslims themselves.



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In Part II, the ISIL's links to the CIA, Mossad, and MI-6 are examined.