WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EAST ASIA, WINSTON
West Busted Supporting ISIS ... Tries Instead to Point Finger At Syrian Government
America's closest allies have been busted supporting ISIS in order to topple Syria's government. Mainstream U.S. writers are
calling for open support of ISIS and Al Qaeda to enact regime change in Syria.
And a newly-declassified government document hints that the West
supported the creation of ISIS.
This may sound far-fectched and wild-eyed ... But the following former
high-level US and UK intelligence officials and whistleblowers confirm that the document implicates the West in the birth of ISIS:
- Military analyst - and famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower - Daniel Ellsberg
- High-level NSA official Thomas Drake
- Well-known FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley
- Senior MI6 officer Alastair Crooke
- MI5 counter-terrorism officer Annie Machon
- British counter-terrorism officer Charles Shoebridge
In any event, whether or not you believe the West created ISIS, the U.S. is now trying to blame the
single most unlikely entity imaginable for ISIS ... the Syrian
government.
Specifically, the U.S. Embassy in Syria just
accused the Syrian government of supporting ISIS:
This is all kinds of silly ... and is Iraq War propaganda redux.
Specifically, the Syrian government and ISIS are
mortal enemies.
The Syrian government - which is
allied with Shia Muslims - has been battling Sunni jihadis for many years. ISIS are
Sunnis ... the
arch-enemy of Shias and the Syrian government. The Syrian government is
ruled by a sect of
Shias called
Alawites.
In other words, ISIS and the Syrian government are on
opposite sides of the war, and have been ever since ISIS was formed.
Similarly, in the run up to the Iraq War, Bush and the gang said that
Saddam was in bed with Al Qaeda. Only one little problem:
Saddam and Al Qaeda hated each other's guts.
Flashback: A Bogus Iraq-Qaeda "Connection"
Because the accusations that the Syrian government is supporting ISIS
mirror so closely what happened in the run up to the Iraq war,
let's recap ...
5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said
“my interest is to hit Saddam”. He also said
“Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions
between top administration officials, several lines below the statement
“judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at
same time”, is the statement
“Hard to get a good case.”
In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that
Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an
excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, “Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
President
Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S.
intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of
Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible
evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda”.
And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency
cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.
And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See
this analysis. Indeed,
Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Moreover, President Bush’s
March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:
(2)
acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is
consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take
the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist
organizations, including those nations, organizations, or
persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war
to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or
aided the 9/11 attacks.
Indeed, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind
reports
that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document
falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA
complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which
was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see
this.
Suskind also revealed that “Bush administration had information from a
top Iraqi intelligence official ‘that there were no weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to
stop an invasion.’ ”
Cheney made the false linkage between Iraq and 9/11
on many occasions.
For example, according to Raw Story, Cheney was still alleging a
connection between Iraq and the alleged lead 9/11 hijacker in September
2003 – a year after it had been widely debunked. When NBC’s Tim Russert
asked him about a poll showing that 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11, Cheney replied:
It’s not surprising that people make that connection.
And even after
the 9/11 Commission debunked any connection, Cheney
said
that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship
with Saddam Hussein’s regime , that Cheney “probably” had information
unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their
homework’ in reporting such ties.
Again, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war by
representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11
attacks. See
this,
this,
this.
On December 16, 2005, Bush admitted
“There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the attack of 9/11″ (and see
this video). However, Bush and Cheney
continued to frequently
invoke 9/11 as justification for the Iraq war. And
see this. (Cheney finally
admitted in 2009 that there was no link.)
A bipartisan Senate Report from 2006 found that
Bush misled the press on Iraq link to Al-Qaeda.
The administration’s false claims about Saddam and 9/11 helped
convince a large portion of the American public to support the invasion
of Iraq. While the focus now may be on false WMD claims, it is important
to remember that, at the time, the alleged link between Iraq and 9/11
was
at least as important in many people’s mind as a reason to invade Iraq.
Top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a
non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and
insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at
extracting
false confessions in an attempt to
create such a false linkage.
McClatchy
reported in 2009:
Former
senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue
said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration…
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
***
When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and
Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.”Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s
people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there
wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army
investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq
and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and
Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more
frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . .
there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might
produce more immediate results.”
“I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”
Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence
officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the
Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly
lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, but they
pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods
aimed at extracting
false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.
The Washington Post
reported the same year:
Despite what you’ve seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.
So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed
Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a
nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not
when faced with a “ticking time bomb” scenario from terrorists, but when
officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
***
Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: “Senior Bush
administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of
terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of
Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a
congressional probe.
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff (Colonel Larry Wilkerson) also
wrote in 2009 that the Bush administration’s “principal priority for
intelligence was
not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S.
but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda.”
Here We Go Again ...
Of course, truth is the first casualty of war, and so the fact that
the Syrian government and ISIS are mortal enemies or that Saddam and Al
Qaeda hated each other makes no difference in the middle of a tidal wave
of propaganda.
The U.S. has decided on
regime change (again!) in Syria, just like it committed to
regime change (again!) in Iraq.
And America will say and do
anything to get its war on.