The CIA's Saudi and Islamic State mole By Wayne Madsen Report

The CIA's Saudi and Islamic State mole By Wayne Madsen Report
There is a reason why Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan has done everything possible to interfere with President-elect Donald Trump taking the reins of the presidency on January 20, 2017. As a mole for the Saudi royal family and a convert to Wahhabist Islam, Brennan has no desire to see certain individuals, who are well aware of his Islamist beliefs, ascend to positions of power in the U.S. intelligence community. The greatest threat to Brennan comes from retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, tapped by Trump to become the National Security Adviser.

Brennan the Saudi mole

High-level moles are the bane of every intelligence agency. There is still a reason to believe that the American spy for Israel, Jonathan Pollard, reported to a higher-level Israeli intelligence mole within the Reagan administration. Britain's MI-5 Security Service remains plagued to this day over evidence that its Cold War-era director, Roger Hollis, was the "Fifth Man" in the "Cambridge Five" Soviet spy ring.

It matters not that the Cold War is over when suspecting there are senior level intelligence moles in American espionage agencies. Brennan, in almost every counter-intelligence sense, fits the bill as a mole.

In 2014, Flynn was fired as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) by President Obama. Obama was advised by Brennan to dump Flynn because the DIA director was producing intelligence policy documents showing that it was a mistake and against U.S. security interests to support Syrian jihadists who were trying to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. For Brennan's Saudi and Wahhabist controllers, this was tantamount to blasphemy.

Brennan blindsided the American people by claiming the Syrian rebel forces were "moderates." Flynn countered Brennan in DIA intelligence reports by documenting how the majority of Syrian rebels were radical Islamists supported financially and militarily by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Moreover, Flynn maintained that "Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria." Brennan was furious at his fellow Irish Catholic's view of Syria and the Middle East.

The Saudis had carefully groomed Brennan ever since his days as CIA station chief in Riyadh in the mid-1990s. The Saudi King, as "Custodian of the Two Holy Shrines of Mecca and Medina," arranged for Brennan, a convert to Wahhabi Islam while running the CIA's Saudi station, to perform the "hajj" pilgrimage to Mecca. Only observant Muslims are permitted to visit the Al Kaaba Al Musharrafah (The Holy Kaaba) in Mecca.

Brennan tried to keep his conversion a secret. However, after 9/11, the FBI began investigating all Saudi links within the U.S. government. What FBI agents soon discovered was that the Saudis had key intelligence and religious assets salted throughout the U.S. government and, most troubling, within the CIA. One of the key Saudi assets was Brennan.

Brennan's systematic "disposition" of his enemies

In March 2013, just prior to Brennan's being confirmed by the U.S. Senate, former FBI agent John Guandolo confirmed that Brennan had indeed converted to Islam while he was the CIA chief in Riyadh. Brennan had previously served as Obama's counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council. He was also in charge of the cleansing of the Obama/Dunham family passport files at the State Department in 2008 while CEO of The Analysis Corporation, a CIA contractor.

It was Brennan who helped cover up the Saudi government's role in the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, which killed 19 U.S. servicemen. As chief FBI investigator of the bombing, John O. Neill came across hard intelligence linking the Khobar bombings to the Saudi government. While not the only reason, it was a significant reason for Brennan to set O'Neill up in a briefcase theft caper before his retirement in 2001. O'Neill had just taken the job as head of security for the World Trade Center when the terrorist plot involving Saudi Arabia brought the towers down on September 11, 2001. O'Neill was killed in the collapse. Brennan fought strenuously against the release of the 28 classified pages from the Congressional Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.

Although finally released with redactions and Brennan's acquiescence, the 28 pages, although highly suggestive of Saudi government involvement, could not be used as prima facie evidence to implicate the House of Saud. There is no reason to believe that what was released constituted the original text contained in the 28 pages. Brennan had every reason to tamper with the original pages in order to protect the Saudis, and by extension, himself.

As CIA director, Brennan would possess most of the keys to the U.S. intelligence kingdom. And Brennan's kingdom would make America's most closely guarded secrets available to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the world's chief supporter of Islamic jihadist terrorist networks, including the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and numerous others.

To placate his Saudi masters, the Jesuit-educated Brennan opted to take the oath of office as CIA director on a copy of the secular U.S. Constitution, not on the Bible, as every past CIA director, Christian and Jewish, had done. One of Brennan's first acts as CIA director was to ban the term "jihadist" to describe Islamist terrorists, preferring instead the word "extremist." As a Wahhabi Muslim, Brennan understood that "jihad" is a term used in the Koran compelling observant Muslims to maintain and spread what they consider to be the one true faith in Allah (God). For Brennan to use the term "jihad" in a negative or pejorative sense would constitute "haram" or a "forbidden act," according to the Muslim Koran and Sunnah religious texts. Brennan stated that any suggestion that the U.S. was at war with the religion of Islam was an affront to the faith, a comment spoken as a true Wahhabist believer.

Brennan's climb up the ladder

Brennan worked his way up the ladder at the CIA after his conversion to Islam. In 1999, Brennan was appointed chief of staff to CIA director George Tenet. In March 2001, as final implementation plans were being laid to carry out the 9/11 attacks, Brennan became deputy executive director of the CIA. After 9/11, Brennan was in charge of identifying, renditioning, and "terminating with extreme prejudice" anyone who could track 9/11 planning and implementation back to himself, the Saudi government, and the Israeli Mossad -- a key intelligence partner of the House of Saud. But Brennan's top mission was to ensure that a CIA asset, long groomed by Langley for the White House, was elected president in 2008. Barack Obama, who was schooled as a boy in Jakarta in the Muslim faith and whose Kenyan father was a Muslim, was the "chosen one." Obama was propelled to the national stage after the political careers of a number of Illinois politicians -- Blair Hull, Jack Ryan, and finally, Rod Blagojevich -- were trashed in a series of CIA dirty tricks campaigns.

From 2003 to 2004, Brennan was the chief of the CIA's Terrorist Threat Integration Center. While there, and later, while Obama's counter-terrorism chief, Brennan called the shots on CIA drone targets as the custodian of the "Disposition Matrix." Systematically, any jihadist who could have blown the whistle on Brennan was summarily liquidated. As CIA director, Brennan continued to use the "Disposition Matrix" to terminate potential witnesses to his selling out to the Saudis.

After Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab -- the infamous "underwear bomber" -- tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 during its final approach to Detroit International Airport from Amsterdam on Christmas Day 2009, Brennan said U.S. intelligence agencies "did not miss any signs" that could have prevented the attempt. Brennan, again, was lying in order to cover up the fact that U.S. intelligence agents had cleared the Nigerian to board the flight without a passport by claiming he was a Sudanese refugee traveling only with refugee documents.

Abdulmutallab, known as "Farouk1986" on various Internet websites as a jihadist sympathizer, was already known to be a follower of American citizen and Al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, a one-time consultant to the Department of Defense. On November 19, 2009, Abdulmutallab's wealthy Nigerian banker father had informed the CIA station in Abuja, Nigeria that his son had "extreme religious views" and that he was in Yemen. Brennan ignored the intelligence from Abuja and gave the green light for the young Nigerian's trip to Detroit. The underwear bomber incident gave Brennan the justification to order another drone strike.



To clear the tracks away from Brennan back to Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda, the CIA's chief judge and executioner ordered a drone hit on al-Awlaki in Yemen on September 30, 2011, and his teenage son in Yemen two weeks later. These drone hits eliminated problems with two potential witnesses to Brennan's treasonous activities. As far as Abdulmutallab is concerned, he is permanently incommunicado as a result of a four consecutive lifetime sentence at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

Character assassination of Brennan's opponents in the Intelligence Community

To protect his Muslim identity, Brennan also set about to destroy troublesome opponents. Former FBI agent Guandolo was the first to receive Brennan's thuggish treatment. Information was leaked that Guandolo had, during 2005, maintained an intimate relationship with a confidential source, Lori Mody, in the federal prosecution of Louisiana U.S. Representative William Jefferson. Although trial judge T.S. Ellis III ruled the affair irrelevant to the case against Jefferson, Guandolo was forced to quit the FBI after the leak about his past sexual affairs somehow landed on the FBI director's office from Guandolo's therapist's office. Guandolo resigned from the FBI in 2009 amid a furor over his extramarital affair with Mody.

Apparently, the CIA continued to believe that breaking into psychiatrists' offices was justified even after CIA agents had been caught doing it in the case of Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. After Guandolo, like Flynn, began warning about the jihadist threat, Brennan went on the warpath. Guandolo was cashiered as a result of the leak of therapist files to the FBI and Flynn was fired after he was tagged by Brennan as an enemy of Islam. When asked how the psychiatrist's files ended up with the FBI, Guandolo stated simply, "it's a lot simpler than you think."

A declassified version of the DIA's Secret report on the Islamic State, dated August 12, 2012, was unambiguous about U.S. -- CIA and Obama -- support for ISIL in Syria:

“THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION… THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME…”.

As the originating classification authority, Flynn had final say on what to release pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act filed by Judicial Watch with the DIA. And the fact that the above paragraph was allowed to be released, in full, sent Brennan and Obama through the roof. On April 30, 2014, Flynn was forced to retire, a full year before the end of his tour, from the U.S. Army.

Brennan began circulating rumors to Washington officialdom that Flynn was guilty of developing his own facts, dubbed "Flynn facts," in intelligence reports. Brennan's goal was to discredit Flynn's and the DIA's intelligence pinning support for ISIL and other jihadists on the CIA. A tip from Flynn's predecessor, Vincent Stewart, to former Secretary of State Colin Powell intimated that Flynn was "abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad management, etc." It was information that Brennan used to convince Obama to send Flynn packing.

It was no coincidence that Guandolo and Flynn both ended up being described as hate mongers by the Zionist-run Southern Poverty Law Center, an Orwellian "Ministry of Truth" designed to stifle free speech in the United States and an organization that has served the interests of the CIA.

The recent assassination of Russian ambassador to Turkey Andrey Karlov by an off-duty Turkish anti-riot police officer, who casually strolled into an art exhibit in Ankara, bears the markings of Brennan's "Disposition Matrix." Karlov served in Ankara since 2013 and his posting overlapped with Flynn's term as DIA chief. It is known that Flynn, like Trump, sees Russia as an invaluable ally against the Islamic State and its major allies, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Brennan and his friends inside the Turkish dictatorship of Recep Tayyip Erdogan are trying to spin the story that the Islamist police assassin of Karlov, Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, worked for the Fethulleh Gulen organization. Gulen is a moderate Muslim businessman-cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania who has been a fierce critic of the Islamic State and Erdogan's alliance with it in Syria.

Although a past CIA asset, Gulen would have no interest in ordering a hit on the Russian ambassador. As a Saudi intelligence mole, Brennan does have a keen interest in the killing of Karlov. By assassinating Karlov, Brennan has driven a wedge in an emerging Russian-Turkish agreement to consolidate Assad's control of Aleppo and bring about the end of Brennan's jihadist army in Syria.

Brennan's CIA Secret report on Russia influencing the 2016 U.S. election through a cyber-offensive warfare program is another product of Brennan's attempt to deny the White House to Trump. Brennan understands that his Saudi masters are fretting over Trump's presidency and his antipathy toward to Saudi and Gulf Arab states. Guandolo, who has found a home with some problematic characters, including generic Muslim-haters like Frank Gaffney and Pamela Geller, has stated that the Obama administration
 "intentionally" aided terrorists and has committed treason.

It is clear that Guandolo saw FBI raw intelligence on Brennan that would lead anyone to conclude that the Saudis and their Wahhabist imams have benefited from a major mole inside the CIA for at least two decades. And there is no telling what Flynn was able to gather on Brennan, especially while enjoying "all-source" intelligence access to signals intelligence intercepts from the National Security Agency, FBI field agents' reports, and even CIA counter-intelligence reports on suspected moles within Langley. There is one thing for certain, Brennan is already destroying incriminating documents at CIA headquarters that could land him in prison for a very long time.

CIA; Turks created caliphate to launch attacks on Russia and China by Wayne Madsen

CIA; Turks created caliphate to launch attacks on Russia and China
by Wayne Madsen


Under the directorship of its pro-Saudi director John Brennan, the Central Intelligence Agency envisaged the Islamic State, which controls large portions of Syria and Iraq, as a base of operations from which Chechens and other Russian Muslims would launch attacks on Russia and Muslim Uighurs from western China would launch terrorist attacks on China. WMR has learned of this massive destabilization plan directed against Russia and China from sources in central Asia close to the U.S. intelligence community.

There are entire communities of Chechens and Uighurs now living in cities and towns in Syria and Iraq occupied by the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). These particular groups have been considered off-limits to U.S. and its "coalition's" attack planners because the CIA and its affiliated George Soros-financed non-governmental organizations, including the Open Society Institute, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Human Rights Watch all support the secessionist movements led by jihadist Chechen and Uighur groups who now have a safe haven inside the self-proclaimed ISIL "caliphate."

Russian and Chinese military forces now operating out of the Syrian port of Tartus and a Russian airbase in Latakia, Syria have enraged the CIA, Barack Obama, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia by hitting these Chechen and Uighur population centers. The Pentagon, which has provided military assistance to Uighurs and Chechens fighting under the banners of the Nusra Front and the Khorasan Group, both linked to Al Qaeda, complained that Russian war planes were striking Syrian "moderate" forces when, in fact, they were hitting Chechen and Uighur targets. Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish forces have insisted that there is no difference between ISIL and the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda, and forces claiming to be with the "Free Syrian Army." Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the Free Syrian Army a "phantom group."

Under the direction of the Turkish MIT intelligence service, thousands of Uighur families now live under ISIL/Nusra Front control in the Syrian cities of Idlib and Jisr Al-Shughur, the latter outside of Aleppo; Abyad, outside of Raqqa; Deir ex-Zor, in the heart of Syria's oil fields; and the Abu Dhuhur Airbase. The Uighurs were infiltrated through Turkey to Syria by the Turkish government. Some of the Uighurs were encouraged to move to Syria with the help of an MIT-funded Uighur language website in Turkey. Four villages around Idlib, devoid of their Syrian inhabitants who fled to Turkey and Europe, are now almost exclusively populated by Uighur squatters. Uighur children have also been enlisted to fight for jihadist forces.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees himself as the leader of a future pan-Turkic Islamist state stretching from western China to Bosnia and Albania. His intelligence service and pro-Islamist political party plays host to a number of central Asian Turkic radicals from as far away as Tuva, a Buddhist autonomous republic of Russia in Siberia, to Tatarstan, a largely Muslim autonomous republic of Russia in the Volga basin.

Also living in Syria are large groups of Chechens who are loyal to the Chechen Caucasus Emirate. They have been recruited from inside Chechnya as well as from the Republic of Georgia's Pankisi Gorge.
As with the Uighurs, entire Chechen families have been settled by Turkey and the CIA in Syria under the ISIL/jihadist banner.

Radio Free Asia's Uighur service and Radio Free Europe's North Caucasus Service have been used by the CIA to stir up jihadist sentiments among not only Uighurs and Chechens, respectively, but in the case of the North Caucasus Service, among Dagestanis, Kabardins, Ingushetis, Cherkessians, Karachays, Balkars, and other Muslim groups. The following news release of October 5, 2015, is how Radio Free Europe is being used to rally jihadist supporters to the ranks of the Nusra Front in Syria by creating a "bandwagon" effect: "A group of around 1,500 Chechen, Uzbek, and Tajik fighters in Syria has pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda's Syria wing Nusra Front, a group monitoring the war said September 23. Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar (Muhajireen Brigade) or JMA made the pledge in a statement distributed by supporters online, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said . . . Nusra Front's leader said in June his group had around 30 percent foreign fighters, including Europeans, Asians, Russians, and Chechens." The CIA propaganda issued forth by Radio Free Europe attempts to pain a difference between Nusra Front and ISIL, claiming the Nusra Front leaders are the loyal successors to Osama Bin Laden. Former CIA director General David Petraeus recently suggested that the United States ally itself with Al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq to fight ISIL.


Spurred on by Radio Free Europe's North Caucasus Service and Soros-funded NGOs, Kabardins, like those above, have been recruited to fight for ISIL and allied jihadist groups in Syria.

Radio Free Europe/Liberty's propaganda broadcasts in the Tajik language had their success when earlier this year it was announced that the U.S.-trained commander of Tajikistan's OMON Special Forces, Col. Gulmurod Khalimov, defected, along with several other Tajiks, to fight for ISIL in Syria. Khalimov had a stark message for the United States, which has been helping ISIL/Nusra Front/Khorasan in Syria: "Listen, you American pigs, I’ve been three times to America, and I saw how you train fighters to kill Muslims . . .God willing, I will come with this weapon to your cities, your homes, and we will kill you.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is a CIA/Soros propaganda operation in support of the Syrian rebel/jihadist cause. Tatar supporters of Nusra Front in Syria have also been identified as traveling from the Syrian front to join Ukrainian fascist forces fighting against Russian-speaking separatists in eastern Ukraine with the support of the Petro Poroshenko regime in Kiev.
Uighur child soldiers fighting for ISIL in Syria. The CIA sees him as a future terrorist fighting against Chinese forces on the streets of Urumchi, the capital of the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Republic.
The Uighurs and Chechens form a large bulk of the Nusra Front, which, in addition to the United States and France, has also received military, intelligence, and logistics help from Israel. The Uighurs and Chechens have been at the forefront of executing Syrian Christians and Alawites, the latter called "Nusayri" by the Uighurs, and carrying out the destruction of churches and ancient relics.

The Uighurs have also used the services of Salafist learning centers in Saudi Arabia, including the Universities of Medina and Jeddah, to spread Wahhabist propaganda to Uighur refugee population centers in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Thailand. One such video in the Uighur language contains the following exhortation to Uighur militants: "those Chinese Buddhists, their small eyes, flat noses. Judgment day will not come, until we attacked them. Judgment day will not come, until we slaughter them. Judgment day will not come, until our war with them and attacking them." WMR has learned up until the deployment of Chinese military forces to assist their Russian allies in Syria, China's policy has been to transfer the Uighur problem to distant shores and away from the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Republic in western China. The threat of ISIL-controlled Uighur cities to train terrorists to attack China and its interests in the Middle East, particularly those in the energy sector, convinced China that it was time to act militarily in concert with Russia, Iran, and the Bashar al-Assad government in Damascus.

The Chechens, who have made no secret of their desire to export ISIL fighters in Syria and Iraq to the Caucasus and the very heart of Moscow, have, with the help of Turkish intelligence, enlisted Bashkir, Tatar, Dagestani, and other Muslim jihadists to move to Syria. The majority of Chechen forces are based at Sheikh Suleiman Army base in Aleppo and the Menagh Air Base in northwestern Syria. One of the top Chechen commanders is the U.S. Special Forces-trained Georgian Tarkhan Batirashvili, whose nom de guerre is Abu Omar al-Shishani or "Abu Omar the Chechen."

When Obama and his mouth pieces claim that Russia is attacking "non-jihadist" targets in Syria they are being disingenuous. What they should say, if they wanted to be honest, is that Russia is hitting non-Syrian and non-Arab Islamists in Syria who were recruited for the anti-Assad jihad by America's Turkish and Saudi "allies" and armed and trained by the CIA and Mossad. THe CIA's Brennan studiously avoids the use of the term "jihadist" in order to not alienate the agency's radical Islamist friends and drive them away from Langley's control in the future U.S.-planned terrorist wars against Russia and China. 

Ukraine and the grand chessboard By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Ukraine and the grand chessboard By Pepe Escobar The US State Department, via spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki, said that reports of CIA Director John Brennan telling regime changers in Kiev to "conduct tactical operations" - or an "anti-terrorist" offensive - in eastern Ukraine are "completely false". This means Brennan did issue his marching orders. And by now the "anti-terrorist" campaign - with its nice little Dubya rhetorical touch - has degenerated into farce. Now couple that with NATO secretary general, Danish retriever Anders Fogh Rasmussen, yapping about the strengthening of military footprint along NATO's eastern border: "We will have more planes in the air, mores ships on the water and more readiness on the land." Welcome to the Two Stooges doctrine of post-modern warfare. Pay up or freeze to death Ukraine is for all practical purposes broke. The Kremlin's consistent position for the past three months has been to encourage the European Union to find a solution to Ukraine's dire economic mess. Brussels did nothing. It was betting on regime change to the benefit of Germany's heavyweight puppet Vladimir Klitschko, aka Klitsch The Boxer. Regime change did happen, but orchestrated by the Khaganate of Nulands - a neo-con cell of the State Department and its assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nulands. And now the presidential option is between - what else - two US puppets, choco-billionaire Petro Poroshenko and "Saint Yulia" Timoshenko, Ukraine's former prime minister, ex-convict and prospective president. The EU is left to pick up the (unpayable) bill. Enter the International Monetary Fund - via a nasty, upcoming "structural adjustment" that will send Ukrainians to a hellhole even grimmer than the one they are already familiar with. Once again, for all the hysteria propagated by the US Ministry of Truth and its franchises across the Western corporate media, the Kremlin does not need to "invade" anything. If Gazprom does not get paid all it needs to do is to shut down the Ukrainian stretch of Pipelineistan. Kiev will then have no option but to use part of the gas supply destined for some EU countries so Ukrainians won't run out of fuel to keep themselves and the country's industries alive. And the EU - whose "energy policy" overall is already a joke - will find itself with yet another self-inflicted problem. The EU will be mired in a perennial lose-lose situation if Brussels does not talk seriously with Moscow. There's only one explanation for the refusal: hardcore Washington pressure, mounted via the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Again, to counterpunch the current hysteria - the EU remains Gazprom's top client, with 61% of its overall exports. It's a complex relationship based on interdependence. The capitalization of Nord Stream, Blue Stream and the to-be-completed South Stream includes German, Dutch, French and Italian companies. So yes, Gazprom does need the EU market. But up to a point, considering the mega-deal of Siberian gas delivery to China which most probably will be signed next month in Beijing when Russian President Vladimir Putin visits President Xi Jinping. The crucial spanner in the works Last month, while the tortuous Ukraine sideshow was in progress, President Xi was in Europe clinching deals and promoting yet another branch of the New Silk Road all the way to Germany. In a sane, non-Hobbesian environment, a neutral Ukraine would only have to gain by positioning itself as a privileged crossroads between the EU and the proposed Eurasian Union - as well as becoming a key node of the Chinese New Silk Road offensive. Instead, the Kiev regime changers are betting on acceptance into the EU (it simply won't happen) and becoming a NATO forward base (the key Pentagon aim). As for the possibility of a common market from Lisbon to Vladivostok - which both Moscow and Beijing are aiming at, and would be also a boon for the EU - the Ukraine disaster is a real spanner in the works. And a spanner in the works that, crucially, suits only one player: the US government. The Obama administration may - and "may" is the operative word here - have realized the US government has lost the battle to control Pipelineistan from Asia to Europe, despite all the efforts of the Dick Cheney regime. What energy experts call the Asian Energy Security Grid is progressively evolving - as well as its myriad links to Europe. So what's left for the Obama administration is this spanner in the works - still trying to scotch the full economic integration of Eurasia. The Obama administration is predictably obsessed with the EU's increasing dependency on Russian gas. Thus its grandiose plan to position US shale gas for the EU as an alternative to Gazprom. Even assuming this might happen, it would take at least a decade - with no guarantee of success. In fact, the real alternative would be Iranian gas - after a comprehensive nuclear deal and the end of Western sanctions (the whole package, not surprisingly, being sabotaged en masse by various Beltway factions.) Just to start with, the US cannot export shale gas to countries with which it has not signed a free trade agreement. That's a "problem" which might be solved to a great extent by the secretly negotiated Trans-Atlantic Partnership between Washington and Brussels (see Breaking bad in southern NATOstan, Asia Times Online, April 15, 2014.) In parallel, the Obama administration keeps applying instances of "divide and rule" to scare minor players, as in spinning to the max the specter of an evil, militaristic China to reinforce the still crawling "pivoting to Asia". The whole game harks back to what Dr Zbig Brzezinski conceptualized way back in his 1997 opus The Grand Chessboard - and fine-tuned for his disciple Obama: the US ruling over Eurasia. Still the Kremlin won't be dragged into a military quagmire. It's fair to argue Putin has identified the Big Picture in the whole chessboard, which spells out an increasing Russia-China strategic partnership as crucial as an energy-manufacturing synergy with Europe; and most of all the titanic fear of US financial elites of the inevitable, ongoing process centered on the BRICS-conducted (and spreading to key Group of 20 members) drive to bypass the petrodollar. Ultimately, this all spells out the progressive demise of the petrodollar in parallel to the ascent of a basket to currencies as the reserve currency in the international system. The BRICS are already at work on their alternative to the IMF and the World Bank, investing in a currency reserve pool and the BRICS development bank. While a tentative new world order slouches towards all points Global South to be born, Robocop NATO dreams of war. 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.