Zarqawi, once a petty criminal turned Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq and the US posterchild for takfiri terrorism, served as a US intelligence asset tasked with quelling Iraq’s resistance to occupation and fanning sectarian hate for the benefit of both Tel Aviv and Washington.
Ranked second only to Osama bin Laden, the US’s most notorious declared enemy during the so-called War on Terror was Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
But a closer examination of Zarqawi’s life and his impact on events in Iraq shows that he was likely a product and tool of US intelligence.
Neoconservative strategists within the administration of George W. Bush utilized Zarqawi as a pawn to justify the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the American public.
Moreover, he was instrumental in fomenting internal discord within Iraqi resistance groups opposing the US occupation, ultimately instigating a sectarian civil war between Iraq’s Sunni and Shia communities.
Israel’s plan unfolds in Iraq
This deliberate strategy of tension in Iraq advanced Tel Aviv’s goal of perpetuating the country’s vulnerabilities, dividing populations along sectarian lines, and weakening its army’s ability to challenge Israel in the region.
It has long been known that the CIA created Al-Qaeda as part of its covert war on the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s and supported Al-Qaeda elements in various wars, including in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya in the 1990s.
Additionally, evidence points to CIA support for Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups during the clandestine war in Syria launched in 2011 amid the so-called Arab Spring.
Despite this history, western journalists, analysts, and historians still take at face value that Zarqawi and AQI were sworn enemies of the US.
Without understanding Zarqawi’s role as a US intelligence asset, it is impossible to understand the destructive role the US (and Israel) played in the bloodshed inflicted on Iraq, not only during the initial 2003 invasion but in launching the subsequent sectarian strife as well.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was born Ahmed Fadhil Nazar al-Khalaylah but later changed his name to reflect his birthplace, Zarqa, an industrial area near Amman, Jordan. In and out of prison in his youth, he would become radicalized during his time behind bars.
Zarqawi traveled to Afghanistan to fight with the CIA-backed mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. Upon his return to Jordan, he helped start a local Islamic militant group called Jund al-Sham and was imprisoned in 1992.
After his release from prison following a general amnesty, Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan in 1999. TheAtlantic notes that he first met Osama bin Laden at this time, who suspected that Zarqawi’s group had been infiltrated by Jordanian intelligence while in prison, which accounted for his early release.
Zarqawi then fled Afghanistan to the pro-US Kurdistan region of northern Iraq and established a training camp for his fighters in the fateful year of 2001.
The missing link
Eager to implicate Iraq in the 9/11 attacks, it wasn’t long before the Bush administration officials soon used Zarqawi’s presence to shroud Washington’s geopolitical agendas there.
In February 2003, at the UN Security Council, US Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed that Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq proved Saddam was harboring a terrorist network, necessitating a US invasion.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “This assertion was later disproved, but it irreversibly thrust Zarqawi’s name into the international spotlight.”
Powell made the claim even though the Kurdish region of Iraq, where Zarqawi established his base, was effectively under US control. The US air force imposed a no-fly zone on the region after the 1991 Gulf War. Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, was also known to have a presence there, a reality that Iran actively acknowledges and remains vigilant about.
Curiously, despite Zarqawi’s base being nestled within the confines of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Bush administration opted for inaction when presented with a golden opportunity to neutralize him.
The Wall Street Journalreported that the Pentagon drew up detailed plans in June 2002 to strike Zarqawi’s training camp but that “the raid on Mr Zarqawi didn’t take place. Months passed with no approval of the plan from the White House.”
Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, justified the inaction by claiming “the camp was of interest only because it was believed to be producing chemical weapons,” even though the threat of chemical and biological weapons falling into the hands of terrorists was supposedly the most important reason for toppling Saddam Hussein’s government.
In contrast, General John M. Keane, the US Army’s vice chief of staff at the time, explained that the intelligence on Zarqawi’s presence in the camp was “sound,” the risk of collateral damage was low, and that the camp was “one of the best targets we ever had.”
The Bush administration firmly refused to approve the strikes, despite US General Tommy Franks pointing to Zarqawi’s camp as among the “examples of the terrorist ‘harbors’ that President Bush had vowed to crush.”
As soon as Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq had accomplished its initial purpose of selling the war on Iraq to the US public, and after the March 2003 invasion was already underway, the White House finally approved targeting his camp with airstrikes. But by then, the Wall Street Journal adds, Zarqawi had already fled the area.
Singling out Shiites
Then, in January 2004, the key pillar of the Bush administration’s justification for war unraveled. David Kay, the weapons inspector tasked with finding Iraq’s WMDs, publicly declared, “I don’t think they exist,” after nine months of searching.
TheGuardianreported that the failure to locate any WMDs was such a devastating blow to the rationale for invading Iraq that now “even Bush was rewriting the reasons for going to war.”
On 9 February, as the WMD embarrassment mounted, Secretary of State Powell again claimed that before the invasion, Zarqawi “was active in Iraq and doing things that should have been known to the Iraqis. And we’re still looking for those connections and to prove those connections.”
Two weeks before, US intelligence had conveniently made public a 17-page letter it claimed Zarqawi had written. Its author claimed responsibility for multiple terror attacks, argued that fighting Iraq’s Shia was more important than fighting the occupying US army, and vowed to spark a civil war between the country’s Sunni and Shia communities.
In subsequent months, US officials attributed a series of brutal bombings targeting Iraq’s Shia to Zarqawi without providing evidence of his involvement.
In March 2004, suicide attacks on Shia shrines in Karbala and the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad killed 200 worshippers commemorating Ashura. In April, car bombings in the Shia-majority city of Basra in southern Iraq killed at least 50.
Regarding the Karbala and Kadhimiya attacks, Al-Qaeda issued a statement through Al-Jazeera strongly denying any involvement, but Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head Paul Bremer insisted Zarqawi was involved.
Zarqawi’s alleged attacks on Iraq’s Shia helped drive a wedge between the Sunni and Shia resistance to the US occupation and sowed the seeds of a future sectarian war.
This proved helpful to the US army, which was trying to prevent Sunni and Shia factions from joining forces in resistance to the occupation.
‘Dividing our enemies’
In April 2004, President Bush ordered a full-scale invasion to take control of Fallujah, a city in Anbar province that had become the epicenter of the Sunni resistance.
Vowing to “pacify” the city, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt launched the attack using helicopter gunships, unmanned surveillance drones, and F-15 warplanes.
The attack became controversial as the Marines killed many civilians, destroyed large numbers of homes and buildings, and displaced the majority of the city’s residents.
Eventually, due to widespread public pressure, President Bush was forced to call off the assault, and Fallujah became a ‘no-go’ zone for US forces.
The failure to maintain troops on the ground in Fallujah had US planners turning back to their Zarqawi card to weaken the Sunni resistance from within. In June, a senior Pentagon official claimed that “fresh information” had come to light showing Zarqawi “may be hiding in the Sunni stronghold city of Fallujah.”
The Pentagon official “cautioned, however, that the information is not specific enough to allow a military operation to be launched to try to find al-Zarqawi.”
The sudden appearance of Zarqawi and other Jihadists in Fallujah at this time was not an accident.
In a report written for the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) entitled “Dividing our enemies,” Thomas Henriksen explained that the US military used Zarqawi to exploit differences among its enemies in Fallujah and elsewhere.
He writes that the US military maintained the goal of “fomenting enemy-on-enemy deadly encounters” so that America’s “enemies eliminate each other,” adding that “When divisions were absent, American operators instigated them.”
The Fallujah Case Study
Henriksen then cites events in Fallujah in the fall of 2004 as “a case study” that “showcased the clever machinations required to set insurgents battling insurgents.”
He explained that the takfiri–Salafi views of Zarqawi and his fellow jihadis caused tension with local insurgents who were nationalists and embraced a Sufi religious outlook. Local insurgents also opposed Zarqawi’s tactics, which included kidnapping foreign journalists, killing civilians through indiscriminate bombings, and sabotaging the country’s oil and electricity infrastructure.
Henriksen further explained that US psychological operations, which took “advantage of and deepened the intra-insurgent forces” in Fallujah, led to “nightly gun battles not involving coalition forces.”
These divisions soon extended to the other Sunni resistance strongholds of Ramadi in Anbar province and the Adhamiya district of Baghdad.
The divisions instigated by US intelligence through Zarqawi in Fallujah paved the way for another US invasion of the restive city in November 2004, days after Bush secured re-election.
BBC journalist Mark Urban reported that 2,000 bodies were recovered after the battle, including hundreds of civilians.
Conveniently, “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was not among the dead,” having slipped through the US cordon around the city before the assault began, Urban added.
Domestic consumption
US military intelligence later acknowledged using psychological operations to promote Zarqawi’s role in the Sunni insurgency fighting against the US occupation.
TheWashington Postreported in April 2006 that “The US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” which helped “the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the 11 September 2001 attacks.”
The Post quotes US Colonel Derek Harvey as explaining, “Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will – made him more important than he really is.”
As the Post reports further, the internal documents detailing the psychological operation campaign “explicitly list the ‘US Home Audience’ as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.”
The campaign to promote Zarqawi also proved helpful to President Bush during his re-election campaign in October 2004. When Democratic challenger John Kerry called the war in Iraq a diversion from the so-called War on Terror in Afghanistan, President Bush responded by claiming:
“The case of one terrorist shows how wrong [Kerry’s] thinking is. The terrorist leader we face in Iraq today, the one responsible for planting car bombs and beheading Americans, is a man named Zarqawi.”
Who killed Nick Berg?
Nick Berg, a US contractor in Iraq, was allegedly beheaded by Zarqawi. In May 2004, western news outlets published a video showing Berg, dressed in an orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuit, being beheaded by a group of masked men.
A masked man claiming to be Zarqawi stated in the video that Berg’s killing was in response to the US torture of detainees in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
Berg was in Iraq trying to win reconstruction contracts and disappeared just days after he spent a month in US detention in Mosul, where he was interrogated multiple times by the FBI.
On 8 May, a month after his disappearance, the US military claimed they found his decapitated body on the side of a road near Baghdad.
But US claims that Zarqawi killed Berg are not credible. As the Sydney Morning Heraldreported at the time, there is evidence the beheading video was staged and included footage from Berg’s FBI interrogation. It was uploaded to the internet not from Iraq but from London and remained online just long enough for CNN and Fox News to download it.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt also lied about Berg having been in US military custody, claiming instead he had only been held by the Iraqi police in Mosul.
But the video cemented in the minds of the American public that Zarqawi and Al-Qaeda were major terror threats.
Such was the impact in the US, that following the video’s release, the terms ‘Nick Berg’ and ‘Iraq war’ temporarily replaced pornography and celebrities Paris Hilton and Britney Spears as the internet’s main searches.
Sectarianism, a key US–Israeli goal
Large-scale sectarian war erupted following the February 2006 bombing of the Shia Al-Askari Shrine in the Sunni city of Samarra in central Iraq, although the full extent was mitigated thanks to religious guidance issued by the highest and most influential Shia authority in the land, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Al-Qaeda did not take credit for the attack, but President Bush later claimed that “the bombing of the shrine was an Al-Qaeda plot, all intending to create sectarian violence.”
Zarqawi was finally killed in a US airstrike a few months later, on 7 June 2006. An Iraqi legislator, Wael Abdul-Latif, said Zarqawi had the phone numbers of senior Iraqi officials stored in his cell phone at the time of his death, further showing Zarqawi was being used by elements within the US-backed Iraqi government.
By the time of Zarqawi’s death, the neoconservative agenda to divide and weaken Iraq through instigating chaos and sectarian conflict had reached its pinnacle. This goal was further exacerbated by the emergence of a successor group to AQI – ISIS – which played an outsized role a few years later in destabilizing neighboring Syria, igniting sectarian tensions there, and providing the justification for the renewal of a US military mandate in Iraq.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
No more shadow play. It’s now in the open. No holds barred.
Exhibit 1: Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.
The money quote:
“Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it, not to mention the territory of new regions.”
Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way or another. The Kremlin signal: “We haven’t even started” starts now.
Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal.
Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers leaked. They are being housed in schools. For all practical purposes, this is a NATO force.
That signals, “Let the games begin”. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s business cards are set to be in great demand.
Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on fire. The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing, all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow.
And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in southwest Asia, was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least five strikes.
Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan next October.
Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total political support from Beijing and Moscow.
The sponsors remain the same
Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of course nothing has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers. A massive investigation is in progress.
The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.
Let’s go pop. To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this ain’t no disco/ this ain’t no fooling around”. Oh no; it’s more like an all-American psy op. ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real Muslims. And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them.
That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in: ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably Tajiks – trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the commando killers did not look like Slavs.
It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He directly connected the “warnings” in early March from American and British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.
The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the Agalarovs: an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…
… Donald Trump.
Talk about a Deep State-pinpointed target.
ISIS spin-off or banderistas – the sponsors remain the same. The clownish secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov, was dumb enough to virtually, indirectly confirm they did it, saying on Ukrainian TV, “we will give them [Russians] this kind of fun more often.”
But it was up to Sergei Goncharov, a veteran of the elite Russia Alpha anti-terrorism unit, to get closer to unwrapping the enigma: he told Sputnik the most feasible mastermind is Kyrylo Budanov – the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
The “spy chief” who happens to be the top CIA asset in Kiev.
It’s got to go till the last Ukrainian
The three exhibits above complement what the head of NATO’s
military committee, Rob Bauer, previously told a security forum in Kiev: “You need more than just grenades – you need people to replace the dead and wounded. And this means mobilization.”
Translation: NATO spelling out this is a war until the last Ukrainian.
And the “leadership” in Kiev still does not get it. Former Minister of Infrastructure Omelyan: “If we win, we will pay back with Russian oil, gas, diamonds and fur. If we lose, there will be no talk of money – the West will think about how to survive.”
In parallel, puny “garden-and jungle” Borrell admitted that it would be “difficult” for the EU to find an extra 50 billion euros for Kiev if Washington pulls the plug. The cocaine-fueled sweaty sweatshirt leadership actually believes that Washington is not “helping” in the form of loans, but in the form of free gifts. And the same applies for the EU.
The Theater of the Absurd is unmatchable. The German Liver Sausage Chancellor actually believes that proceeds from stolen Russian assets “do not belong to anyone”, so they can be used to finance extra Kiev weaponizing.
Everyone with a brain knows that using interest from “frozen”, actually stolen Russian assets to weaponize Ukraine is a dead end – unless they steal all of Russia’s assets, roughly $200 billion, mostly parked in Belgium and Switzerland: that would tank the Euro for good, and the whole EU economy for that matter.
Eurocrats better listen to Russian Central Bank major “disrupter” (American terminology) Elvira Nabiullina: The Bank of Russia will take “appropriate measures” if the EU does anything on the “frozen”/stolen Russian assets.
It goes without saying that the three exhibits above completely nullify the “La Cage aux Folles” circus promoted by the puny Petit Roi, now known across his French domains as Macronapoleon.
Virtually the whole planet, including the English-speaking Global North, had already been mocking the “exploits” of his Can Can Moulin Rouge Army.
So French, German and Polish soldiers, as part of NATO, are already in the south of Kiev. The most possible scenario is that they will stay far, far away from the frontlines – although traceable by Mr. Khinzal’s business activities.
Even before this new NATO batch arriving in the south of Kiev, Poland – which happens to serve as prime transit corridor for Kiev’s troops – had confirmed that Western troops are already on the ground.
So this is not about mercenaries anymore. France, by the way, is only 7th in terms of mercenaries on the ground, largely trailing Poland, the US and Georgia, for instance. The Russian Ministry of Defense has all the precise records.
In a nutshell: now war has morphed from Donetsk, Avdeyevka and Belgorod to Moscow. Further on down the road, it may not just stop in Kiev. It may only stop in Lviv. Mr. 87%, enjoying massive national near-unanimity, now has the mandate to go all the way. Especially after Crocus.
There’s every possibility the terror tactics by Kiev goons will finally drive Russia to return Ukraine to its original 17th century landlocked borders: Black Sea-deprived, and with Poland, Romania, and Hungary reclaiming their former territories.
Remaining Ukrainians will start to ask serious questions about what led them to fight – literally to their death – on behalf of the US Deep State, the military complex and BlackRock.
As it stands, the Highway to Hell meat grinder is bound to reach maximum velocity.
Genocides in Palestine & Plotted Pandemic for Lethal Vaccines
Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting. For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime. With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians. In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence. In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator.
“To the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again.I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know about the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan”. Saint John Apostle and Evangelist – Book of the Revelation (Rev. 2, 8-10)
In the cover image the prime minister of the Israeli Zionist Regime Benjamin Nethanyau and the “Pope of Freemasonry” Albert Pike
NB – some quotes of American persons have been translated from sources in Italian so forgive any stylistic errors or differences with the original ones
«The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testifies to everything he saw—that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, andblessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near».
This Prologue to the Book of the Revelation (Apocalypse) of Saint John the Evangelist, the only Apostle who died without martyrdom as a reward for his loyalty to Jesus under the cross of Golgotha, reread in recent days, after almost a million deaths caused in recent years by the wars in Ukraine, Syria. Iraq and Libya (to name the best known) and after the genocide of the Israeli army in Palestine in which over 8 thousand children were massacred by bombs in a few weeks together with around 22 thousand adults, we should be inspired by a profound spiritual reflection also by virtue of the prophecy on Armageddon, the final battle of the armies foretold in the Holy Land in the same text on the Apocalypse which in Greek, it is good to remember it only means “revelation”, “prophecy” and not “catastrophe”.
They take on an equally tragic meaning if we think of the holocaust of millions of victims caused both by the pandemic triggered by a SARS-Cov-2 built in the laboratory and by the killer vaccines with which unscrupulous Big Pharma is testing the world population like a massive human guinea-pig to reach the transhumanist goal of eugenic health culture: denial of Nature and the Almighty God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which has survived 7 thousand years of attempts at annihilation.
THE GENOCIDE OF THE PALESTINIANS AND THE HOLOCAUST OF THE VACCINATED
Therefore, the biblical reference in the Book of Revelation to “those who proclaim themselves Jews and are not, but belong to the synagogue of Satan” does not appear in vain in the case of the Zionist leader Netanyahu who is carrying out a genocide of Palestinians after having mass vaccinated his fellow Israelis for a gigantic transversal business between the Weapons Lobby and Big Pharma with American President Joesph Biden.
Modern telecommunications means – where not blocked as in Gaza to prevent reckless reporters from documenting the war crimes ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu already renamed “the Hitler of the 21st Century” by Turkish lawyers who demand his indictment – have made the bloody genocide tacitly legalized by the West and carried out in the churches and hospitals of Palestine terrifying, bringing before the eyes and ears cries that implore revenge and make the sense of forgiveness waver even in Christians, all this satanic torment appears comparable screams from the silence imploded in the hearts of children torn by lethal myocarditis or in the brains devoured by turbo-cancer of the victims of adverse reactions to the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Precisely because their roar against death is silent, broken in the throat by a sudden illness of which political, health and judicial authorities too often do not want to detect and reveal traces of the FAILURE OF A SYSTEM. Precisely that of the New World Order which is seeking God’s mercy with the merciless human reason capable of killing an 8-month-old baby girl, Indi Gregory, although she had a concrete hope of being assisted.
THE CATACLYSM FORECAST BY THE “POPE” OF AMERICAN FREEMASONRY
If all this happening is not a coincidence but appears to be an international and historical conspiracy foreseen in very remote times by the American “Pope of Freemasonry”, a Southern general, about whom we have already written, who was among the Confederate supporters of the Civil War but also among the founders of the KuKluxKlan and among the followers of satanic rites: Albert Pike.
We have already mentioned his extensive correspondence with the 33rd degree Freemason of the Supreme Council of the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite Giuseppe Mazzini who, thanks to the financing of the hooded friends of the London lodges ready to host him even though he was a fugitive terrorist in Europe, planned the Expedition of the Thousand of Masonic guerrilla Giuseppe Garibaldi with whom the Kingdom of Italy wrested a part of Rome from the Papal State in the gigantic and crude plot against Christianity and the Catholic Church, partly attenuated only by the faith of the Ruling Savoy Dynasty.
But we had missed some passages which in the light of today’s events take on monstrous relevance, furthermore proving the imprint of Freemasonry, like a Mark of the Beast, in every religious and political conflictual drift, prodigiously foreseen in detail by General Pike.
In these first episodes we will analyze the conspiratorial complicity of Freemasonry with Zionism. In the next one with Nazism and Jihadist Islamism, where in a previous investigation we have analyzed the role of hooded men between Capitalism and Communism.
«The Third World War will have to be fomented by taking advantage of the differences stirred up by the agents of the Illuminati between political Zionism and the leaders of the Islamic world. The war will have to be oriented so that Islam (including the State of Israel) destroy each other, while at the same time the remaining nations, once again divided and opposed to each other, will then be forced to fight each other until to complete physical, mental, spiritual and economic exhaustion».
This is what Pike wrote to Mazzini on 15 August 1871 in a letter according to the revelations made by the commodore of the Canadian navy William Guy Carr which he later reported in his famous 1954 book Pawns in the Game. He stated that he learned about the letter from the anti-Mason, Cardinal José María Caro Rodríguez of Santiago, Chile, the author of The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled (Hawthorne, California, Christian Book Club of America, 1971).
The Navy official can be considered very reliable as worked also for the Canadian Intelligence Service during World War II, and in 1944 he published Checkmate in the North, a book about an invasion by the Axis forces to take place in the area of the CFB Goose Bay (Canadian Forces Base Goose Bay).
Carr’s books often discuss a Luciferian conspiracy by what he called the “World Revolutionary Movement,” but he later attributed the conspiracy more specifically to the “Synagogue of Satan.”
The term was not a reference to Judaism as he wrote: “I wish to make it clearly and emphatically known that I do not believe the Synagogue of Satan (S.O.S.) is Jewish, but, as Christ told us for a definite purpose, it is comprised of ‘I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.’ (Rev. 2:9 and 3:9)
Albert Pike, the Pope of American Freemasonry
The Canadian commodore reported what we had already mentioned in the previous investigation on Pike and which we will try to contextualize both in the biblical, esoteric and historical context in the following lines.
«The First World War had to be fought to allow the “Illuminati” to overthrow the power of the czars in Russia and transform this country into the fortress of atheist communism. The differences stirred up by “Illuminati” agents between the British and German Empires were used to foment this war. After the war was over, communism had to be built and used to destroy other governments and weaken religions».
Citing Confederate General Pike who was Grand Master of the Mother Lodge of Charleston (but also, in all probability, the only Southerner to have had, until recently, a statue in his memory in the USA sculpted by an Italian but recently destroyed by vandals), the commodore added:
«The Second World War had to be fomented by taking advantage of the difference between fascists and political Zionists. The war had to be fought in order to destroy Nazism and increase the power of political Zionism, in order to allow the establishment of the sovereign state of Israel in Palestine. During the Second World War, a Communist International had to be established as strong as the whole of Christianity. At this point the latter had to be contained and kept under control until required for the final social cataclysm».
On 15 August 1871, as revealed by Carr, the Pope of American Freemasonry Pike revealed to Mazzini that at the end of the Third World War those who aspire to World Government would cause the greatest social cataclysm ever seen.
«We will unleash the nihilists and atheists and provoke a formidable social cataclysm which will clearly show, in all its horror, to the nations, the effect of absolute atheism, the origin of barbarism and bloody subversion».
And then again:
«Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same time».
GEOPOLITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE THIRD WORLD WAR IN FRAGMENTS
If we carefully analyze what has happened in the last twenty years, rereading them with the lens of a geopolitical intelligence analysis, we can put together these dramatic events that prove the gradual increase of the Third World War “in a patchy pattern, in fragments, or in small pieces” as defined several times by Pope Francis.
September 11, 2001 – From the World Trade Center to the War in Afghanistan
Avoidable massacre of the attacks on the Twin Towers facilitated by the obstacles posed by the American counter-espionage of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the investigations of the director of anti-terrorism of the FBI John O’Neill (who died in the World Trade Center where he was hired after being fired following sabotage of his professional activity). The hidden role of the Israeli counter-intelligence Mossad came to light immediately, recently with the disconcerting confirmation that two of the hijackers were collaborating with the CIA.
Palestinian President Abbas issued a decree outlawing the Hamas militias who defeated Fatah (a Palestinian political and paramilitary organization, part of the PLO, of which Yasser Arafat was leader) and therefore removed the Gaza Strip from the control of the Authority Palestinian national authority.
According to various intelligence experts including a former CIA director, Hamas, linked to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood (sons of another Masonic history…), was financed by the USA and Israel precisely to lead to the Palestinian exodus plan that was configured in recent days after the attacks of 7 October which took the highly expert Israeli secret services (Shin Bet, Mossad and the military Aman) by surprise.
In 2014, ISIS founded by Caliph Al Baghdadi entered the war shortly after his liberation from Camp Bucca where he was detained by the US Army for terrorist activity in Iraq. He was believed to be a Mossad and CIA agent
February 20, 2014 – Start of the War in Ukraine
The second Orange Revolution financed by the Zionist Soros in Kiev explodes in all its violence due to the shooting of mysterious mercenary snipers on Ukrainian policemen and the crowd. It seems like a repeat of what the CIA hatched in 2002 in Caracas. The coup financed by NATO countries materializes with the escape of the legitimately elected president Viktor Fedorovyč Yanukovych to friendly Russia.
From there begins the Donbass Civil War which became a Global Conflict after the start of Moscow’s military operation to protect the pro-Russian victims of genocide by the neo-Nazi guerrillas of the Azov Battalion led by the Kiev Regime and also armed by Israel in an apparent, crazy paradox …
In July, however, the Israelis launched Operation Protective Edge to destroy clandestine tunnels into their country, triggering a resurgence of military clashes. Only on 28 August was a ceasefire declared by both sides but the electoral consultations were postponed and never agreed upon again.
October 2023 – Genocide Planned and Legalized in Gaza
Hamas captures hostages from an Israeli Rave Party and several kibbutz settlers in the illegally occupied territories. Israel responds disproportionately by bombing everyone, women, children, hospitals, churches, UN officials. Few Western politicians denounce a GENOCIDE which instead appears LEGALIZED by almost all NATO countries.
If we correlate the recurring subjects of these events it is easy to deduce that the Third World War in fragments has already been implemented for at least two decades with an enormous occult direction of that NATO evoked by Soros to embody the New World Order.
ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL CATALYSM: MANMADE VIRUS PANDEMIC
Let’s go back to the tired “forecasts” of the Freemason Albert Pike and reread a significant phrase:
«We will unleash the nihilists and atheists and provoke a formidable social cataclysm which will clearly show, in all its horror, to the nations, the effect of absolute atheism, the origin of barbarism and bloody subversion».
In 2004 the European Commission chaired by Romano Prodi, a Soros associate, financed the Wuhan Institute of Virology strengthened by the son of President Jiang Zemin, the Executioner of Tiananmen, also in light of an agreement on collaborations for research in the bacteriological field signed with the American president Bill Clinton in 1999.
Now even many US politicians admit their nation’s role in building the laboratory virus. This is denied by the National Intelligence Directorate led by Avril Haines who was deputy CIA director expert in bio-weapons when Fauci was carrying out experiments on Coronaviruses on behalf of the Obama-Biden administration together in Wuhan.
Even the Catholic Church genuflects to the Vaccine GOD.
Let’s reread Pike’s prophecy again, a truly disturbing name when associated with the almost homonymous Covid-19 protein.
«Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same Time»
HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FREEMASONRY AND ZIONISM
The detractors of the military geopolitical analyst and writer William Guy Carr who refers to the diabolical plan of the Pope of American Freemasonry are based on the fact that Albert Pike in 1871 could not have known about the birth of Communism, nor of Nazism, nor of Zionism.
Nor even knowing about the two world wars. Unless you were among those who designed them.
This observation can easily be refuted by citing some historical references already mentioned and which we will highlight.
«In July 1782 the Order of the Illuminati allied itself with Freemasonry during the Congress of Wilhelmsbad, which the historian Freemason Albert Mackey defined as ‘the most important Masonic Congress of the eighteenth century’ – we read on the website Freemasonry Unmasked, full of anecdotes and authoritative historical sources – The participants in that Congress had to swear not to reveal the decisions they had made to anyone (see Nesta H. Webster, World Revolution, 1921, page 31)».
Wilhelmsbad Castle was owned by the Ashkenazi Jewish banker (of Khazar-European origins) Mayer Amschel Rothschild who, according to various historians, in 1777 brought together twelve of his most influential friends and convinced them that if they pooled their resources they could dominate the world: this is how the Bavarian Illuminati was born.
The French Revolution confirms their success with the annihilation of the first important Catholic Monarchy. It will be the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, the regurgitation of the regime of terror, that will inspire Lenin in his plan for the subsequent Bolshevik and Communist revolution.
So Pike was not only still alive at the time but knew the details.
The Independent Order B’nai B’rith or Bené Berith (Hebrew: בני ברית, “sons of the covenant”) is a Jewish lodge founded in 1843 during the presidency of John Tyler and still existing and active. It was founded at the Sinsheimer Café, in the Wall Street neighborhood of New York, by Henry Jones and eleven other people on October 13, 1843. The original name was in German “Bundes-Brueder” (which means “League of Brothers”), in the current one which retains the initials (“BB”).
Most of the founders were German-Jews: that is, Ashkenazi like Mayer Amschel Rothschild but also like his descendant Walter Rothschild, eldest son and heir of the banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the first Jewish baron of England.
Walter Rothschild was among the promoters of the declaration for the formation of the Jewish state in Palestine, later earning the merit of becoming president of the Council of Deputies of British Jews from 1925 to 1926.
From these seeds we arrived at 1917 when a letter from the British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, addressed to the “Dear Lord Rothschild”, sanctioned Balfour’s declaration which committed the British government to supporting the creation in Palestine of a home for the Jews in respect for the rights of other resident minorities.
How did Albert Pike know all these things before they happened?
Very simple because he was among those who concerted them in 1860 when the Southern general through Young America planned the American Civil War to defend the right to slavery, Mazzini with Young Italy committed himself to the Expedition of the Thousand and Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount of Palmerston, British Secretary of State and exponent of the Grand Lodge of England guaranteed all financial and political support.
The first expressions of proto-Zionism took shape, for example, in the foundation of the Universal Israelite Alliance in 1860, an organization aimed at the emancipation of the Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa, and in the publication of various works, including Rome and Jerusalem, written in 1862 by the German Jewish philosopher Moses Hess, Derishat Zion by the Polish-Prussian rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, and the hymn Hatikvah, whose lyrics were written by Naftali Herz Imber and which later became the anthem of the State of Israel.
Zionism draws its roots from the new cultural environment generated in the context of the emancipation of European Jews starting from the French Revolution and throughout the 19th century and from the Haskalah.
The haskalah, with a small delay compared to other Enlightenment movements, arose in Germany and then spread throughout much of Europe and to a small extent also across the Atlantic. The father and inspirer of the movement was Moses Mendelssohn, close to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a free thinker of Protestant extraction and an energetic defender of the Jews in Germany. The latter introduced Mendelssohn into the world of Berlin intellectuals where he dedicated himself to the composition of philosophical essays and dissertations.
A varied and open movement, the haskalah probably did not close its doors even to exponents of the Frankist heresy, a sort of tail of the messianic movement of Shabatai Zevi which had long been in opposition to official Judaism, perhaps linked to lodges of freemasonry, another force of the times, definitely in relation to the Enlightenment philosophy.
Many Jews influenced by the haskalah and the closeness it brought with European culture were seduced by the possibility of assimilation by embracing Christianity. Just think of the family of Karl Marx, descended from rabbis who converted to Protestantism, as did Mendelssohn’s own daughters. Others, however, laid the foundations of the new science of Judaism, the Wissenschaft des Judentums.
THE LODGES INSPIRED BY THE SON OF THE BIBLICAL MURDERER CAIN
Today we add another detail by recalling the figure of John Theophilus Desaguliers (La Rochelle, 12 March 1683 – Covent Garden, 29 February 1744) who was an English scientist, religious and Freemason of French origins.
Desaguliers emigrated to England in 1694, due to the Edict of Fontainebleau, which revoked the freedom of worship of Protestants. He approached Freemasonry, becoming Grand Master of the First Grand Lodge of England in 1718, and Deputy Grand Master in 1723 and 1725. Under his leadership, the Grand Lodge of London and Freemasonry developed in an “astonishing” way in the islands British, to the point that «in 1740 there were already more than 180 lodges».
Each of the earliest Masonic texts contains some sort of history of the craft, or guild, of Freemasonry. The oldest work of this type, the Royal Manuscript, dating from 1390 to 1425, has a brief history in the introduction, which states that the “craft of Freemasonry” began with Euclid in Egypt, and arrived in England during the reign of ruler Æðelstan.
A little later, the Cooke Manuscript traces Freemasonry to Jabal, son of Lamech (Genesis 4, 20-22), and tells how this knowledge reached Euclid, from him to the children of Israel when they were in Egypt, and so on for an elaborate route to Æðelstan. This myth formed the basis for later manuscript foundations, all of which claim that Freemasonry dates back to Biblical times, and pegs its institutional consolidation in England during the reign of Æðelstan (927-939).
Shortly after the formation of the first Grand Lodge of England, James Anderson was commissioned to summarize these “Gothic constitutions” into a pleasing modern form. The constitutions produced by his work have a more widespread historical introduction than any previous one, and once again connect the history of what Freemasonry had become to its biblical roots, always inserting Euclid into the chain of narrative.
The first question that a connoisseur of Judeo-Christian history should ask is almost banal.
Why do the Freemasons, due to fabulous legendary and historical beliefs, trace Freemasonry to one of the descendants of the murderer Cain and not to the third son of Adam named Set from whom the Semitic culture was born?
In France, Chevalier (Knight) Ramsay’s 1737 conference added Crusader Freemasons to the family tree claiming that they had revived the craft with secrets recovered in the Holy Land, under the patronage of the Knights Hospitaller. At this point, the “history” of the profession of continental Freemasonry separated from that of Freemasonry in England which in the meantime had published its “charter”.
THE SCHSM ON THE GREAT ARCHITECT OF THE UNIVERSE
The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, “for the use of the lodges” in London and Westminster, was published in 1723. It was edited by the Presbyterian clergyman James Anderson, by order of John Theophilus Desaguliers, and approved by a committee of the grand lodge under its control. The work was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin, who in that year became Grand Master of the Pennsylvania Freemasons. It was also translated into Dutch (1736), German (1741) and French (1745).
Anderson was minister of the Presbyterian church in Swallow Street, London, which had formerly been a Huguenot church, and whose pastor in the 1690s was Desaguliers’ father. At the time of his meeting with Desaguliers, he appears to have presented himself as a Talmudic scholar.
In various historical testimonies that we summarize for brevity, Anderson himself seems to imply the existence of an Italian Grand Lodge.
In Naples in 1728 he saw the light of the first regular Masonic lodge established in Italy, La Perfetta Unione. Raised by the will of the Prince of San Severo, it had Egyptian symbols such as the pyramid, the Sphinx and the radiant sun in its emblem. Subsequently, the English lodge (“La Loggia degli Inglesi”) was established in Florence, founded in 1731 and Freemasonry spread rapidly, despite a series of papal prohibitions.
But already ahead the so-called Great Schism occurred. According to a widespread opinion, the schism between French and English Freemasonry originates from the general assembly of the Grand Orient of France in September 1877. Accepting the recommendation contained in a report by the Protestant pastor (and Freemason) Frédéric Desmons, the assembly decided by a majority of amend its constitutions by inserting the formula “its principles are absolute freedom of conscience and human solidarity”. This replaced the previous statement “its principles are the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and human solidarity”.
The reaction of the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) was the resolution of March 1878 which reiterated “That the Grand Lodge, while anxious to welcome in the most fraternal spirit the Brethren of any foreign Grand Lodge whose proceedings are conducted according to the Ancient cornerstones of the Order, among which the first and most important is the faith in T. G. A. O. T. U. [“the great Architect of the universe”, in English acronym], cannot recognize as ‘true and genuine’ Brothers all those who have been initiated in lodges that deny or ignore that faith.”
FREEMASONRY SIMILAR TO THE BEAST OF THE APOCALYPSE
Having concluded this long but necessary historical digression on Freemasonry implemented with various Wikipedia sources, let’s return to the beginning. To the book of the Apocalypse of Saint John and the disturbing esoteric symbolisms.
If we summarize the historical notes above we can easily conclude that the first promoters of Zionism in the USA were the founders of the B’nai B’rith Lodge composed of Ashkenazi Jews (as Adolph Hitler is also believed to be) that the historians of Jewish culture they define the “13th Tribe of Israel” as they derive from the diaspora of the Khazars who had converted to Judaism
While in Europe it spread thanks to the Rothschild Dynasty (Red Shield) which was the first to weave subversive plots with an anti-Catholic vocation from the birth of the Bavarian Illuminati up to the pact of terror for the French Revolution from which the liberation of the proto- Zionism together with that Masonic concept of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” imposed by guillotining even the elderly nobles of the Catholic Vendée French region.
«Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same time».
But following this hermeneutical path to the Book of the Apocalypse, one of the most important allegories comes to mind with disconcerting and terrifying impetus:
«The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?» (Rev. 13, 1-4)
The prophet Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist delves into the concept with an aura vision
«Then I saw a second beast, coming out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon.It exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed» (Rev. 13, 11-12)
It is not really scary to note how traditional esoteric Freemasonry became manifest thanks to the Anglican political schism of the Protestants and allowed Pharisaic Judaism, defeated by the Diaspora after the Crucifixion of the Messiah awaited by the Jews, to be reborn in its Talmudic form with Judaism then became with Zionism the most powerful component of the New World Order?
We have historical clues that help identify Freemasonry as one of the two apocalyptic Beasts. But this theme will be explored in greater depth if and when we receive from the Holy Spirit the gift of the wisdom necessary to interpret it. Therefore today we cannot help but insinuate doubt…
POWER OF CHRIST IN THE PROPHECY OF SAINT JOHN THE APOSTLE
But it is precisely Chapter 12 of the Book of the Apocalypse (Rev. 12, 7-12) which comes to illuminate with a radiant dawn of hope the dangers of all of us Christians who strive to be among those “who listen to the words of this prophecy and put into practice the things that are written in it”:
«Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him».
“Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.”
Since Saint John was the only Apostle who died without martyrdom for his loyalty to Jesus Christ under the cross and also survived the hell of imprisonment on Patmos (where he received the visions and locutions collected in the Apocalypse), it is probably very useful to start believing him…
Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting.
For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime.
With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians.
In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence.
In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates
His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others
He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator.
Hekmat Aboukhater is a Syrian American investigative journalist reporting from France, the U.S., and Syria. Hekmat hosts the WhatTheHekmat Podcast and the Conversations With Dissidents show. He has written for The Grayzone and Al Mayadeen. Follow him on X @WhatTheHekmat.
On February 13, the U.S. House of Representatives deliberated on Resolution 3202, the “Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act of 2023.” The following day, the House passed the bill with a 389 to 32 bipartisan majority. Now, the bill moves on to the Senate, where it will most likely pass with similar bipartisan support and a ringing endorsement from President Biden once it reaches his desk.
The bill was pushed with a veneer of Syrian support represented by the advocacy of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) and the Syrian American Council (SAC) – Syrian opposition groups in the U.S. While its aims seem, at face value, to focus on humanitarian issues and a quest for accountability, the reality is much more complicated.
THE BILL’S STATED AIMS
The bill was presented to the public as a tool for accountability purely targeting the Assad-led government of Syria and any of its in-country partners. The bill purports to achieve this by “Prohibiting any U.S. official action to normalize relations with any Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad, “Strengthening the human rights sanctions levied on Syria,” and” Examining the Assad government’s manipulation of the United Nations.”
In keeping with the polite presentation of the bill, Moaz Moustafa, SETF Executive Director, said: “We are proud to see legislation that holds the Assad regime and those normalizing with war criminals accountable” as a response to the passage of the bill.
Similarly, on the House floor, House Foreign Relations Committee chairman Mike McCaul announced that “Congress is sending a message that it remains committed to justice for the Syrian people.”
THE BILL’S TRUE AIMS
While the stated aims seem to be focused on accountability and human rights, the real thrust of the bill was conveniently left unmentioned in the SETF and house representatives’ celebratory posts on X (formerly Twitter).
One line, deep within the 22-page bill, reads: “Section 7438 of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 is amended by striking ‘the date that is 5 years after the date of the enactment of this Act’ and inserting ‘December 31, 2032.’” This hidden line, left out of all the explainer content dished out by SETF and SAC, extends the Caesar Act, set to expire in 2024, for eight more years.
The perversely named Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 has immiserated the more than 12 million Syrian people living under the government of Syria. Since the enactment of the Act, the percentage of the Syrian population below the poverty line has reached 90%, 600,000 Syrian children’s growth was stunted, and cases of anemia in pregnant and breastfeeding women saw a 60% rise.
Described as “unprecedented,” as one of the “strictest and most complex collective regimes in recent history,” and as the “most complicated and far-reaching sanctions regimes ever imposed,” the Syrian groups pushing for Caesar’s eight-year extension understandably shied away from mentioning the most crucial part of this new bill, even though they helped provide Syrian cover for its passing.
None of the four articles written by the SETF mention the extension of the Caesar Sanctions to 2032
On February 13, the U.S. House of Representatives deliberated on Resolution 3202, the “Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act of 2023.” The following day, the House passed the bill with a 389 to 32 bipartisan majority. Now, the bill moves on to the Senate, where it will most likely pass with similar bipartisan support and a ringing endorsement from President Biden once it reaches his desk.
The bill was pushed with a veneer of Syrian support represented by the advocacy of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) and the Syrian American Council (SAC) – Syrian opposition groups in the U.S. While its aims seem, at face value, to focus on humanitarian issues and a quest for accountability, the reality is much more complicated.
THE BILL’S STATED AIMS
The bill was presented to the public as a tool for accountability purely targeting the Assad-led government of Syria and any of its in-country partners. The bill purports to achieve this by “Prohibiting any U.S. official action to normalize relations with any Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad, “Strengthening the human rights sanctions levied on Syria,” and” Examining the Assad government’s manipulation of the United Nations.”
In keeping with the polite presentation of the bill, Moaz Moustafa, SETF Executive Director, said: “We are proud to see legislation that holds the Assad regime and those normalizing with war criminals accountable” as a response to the passage of the bill.
Similarly, on the House floor, House Foreign Relations Committee chairman Mike McCaul announced that “Congress is sending a message that it remains committed to justice for the Syrian people.”
THE BILL’S TRUE AIMS
While the stated aims seem to be focused on accountability and human rights, the real thrust of the bill was conveniently left unmentioned in the SETF and house representatives’ celebratory posts on X (formerly Twitter).
One line, deep within the 22-page bill, reads: “Section 7438 of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 is amended by striking ‘the date that is 5 years after the date of the enactment of this Act’ and inserting ‘December 31, 2032.’” This hidden line, left out of all the explainer content dished out by SETF and SAC, extends the Caesar Act, set to expire in 2024, for eight more years.
The perversely named Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 has immiserated the more than 12 million Syrian people living under the government of Syria. Since the enactment of the Act, the percentage of the Syrian population below the poverty line has reached 90%, 600,000 Syrian children’s growth was stunted, and cases of anemia in pregnant and breastfeeding women saw a 60% rise.
Described as “unprecedented,” as one of the “strictest and most complex collective regimes in recent history,” and as the “most complicated and far-reaching sanctions regimes ever imposed,” the Syrian groups pushing for Caesar’s eight-year extension understandably shied away from mentioning the most crucial part of this new bill, even though they helped provide Syrian cover for its passing.
None of the four articles written by the SETF mention the extension of the Caesar Sanctions to 2032
As for normalization, although the bill purports to impose only a U.S. policy of wholesale rejection of normalization with the Syrian government, in reality, the bill lists several measures that would threaten a whole list of other countries wishing to restore diplomatic relations with Syria.
The bill calls on the Secretary of State to submit an annual report to Congress detailing a “strategy to describe and counter actions taken or planned by foreign governments to normalize, engage with, or upgrade political, diplomatic, or economic ties with the regime led by Bashar al-Assad in Syria.” This annual report must also include “a full list of diplomatic meetings at the Ambassador level or above, between the Syrian regime and any representative of the Governments” mentioned.
The report must also include a list of any transaction of $500,000 or more between any “foreign person located in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, or Lebanon” and any “recipient in any area of Syria held by the Assad regime.”
SANCTIONING SYRIA: A WASHINGTON TRADITION
H.R. 3202 is not the first, nor will it be the last, sanctions bill to target Syria. The economic war that the United States has been waging against Syria started long before a Tunisian banana salesman self-immolated, launching what would come to be known as the Arab Spring.
In 1973, as the October War was waging, Henry Kissinger was perfecting his shuttle diplomacy in hopes of breaking the thorn that was former Syrian President Hafez Al Assad. Kissinger tried everything in his arsenal to get the then-Syrian president to abandon the military struggle and resistance of alliances he was waging against the U.S. presence in the Middle East, particularly Israel.
Upon failing to sway Assad’s Syria from supporting Hezbollah, Palestinian Jihad, Hamas, and other resistance groups, and once Syria’s position was weakened by the Egyptian signing of the 1978 Camp David Accords, the ire of the U.S. State Department and Treasury, fell upon the Arab Republic.
Syria’s name was written atop the inaugural “State Sponsors of Terrorism” (SST) list in 1979, along with Iraq, Libya, and South Yemen. Today, Syria remains the only inaugural member still on the list, sharing the limelight with newly added countries: Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.
On February 13, the U.S. House of Representatives deliberated on Resolution 3202, the “Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act of 2023.” The following day, the House passed the bill with a 389 to 32 bipartisan majority. Now, the bill moves on to the Senate, where it will most likely pass with similar bipartisan support and a ringing endorsement from President Biden once it reaches his desk.
The bill was pushed with a veneer of Syrian support represented by the advocacy of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) and the Syrian American Council (SAC) – Syrian opposition groups in the U.S. While its aims seem, at face value, to focus on humanitarian issues and a quest for accountability, the reality is much more complicated.
THE BILL’S STATED AIMS
The bill was presented to the public as a tool for accountability purely targeting the Assad-led government of Syria and any of its in-country partners. The bill purports to achieve this by “Prohibiting any U.S. official action to normalize relations with any Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad, “Strengthening the human rights sanctions levied on Syria,” and” Examining the Assad government’s manipulation of the United Nations.”
In keeping with the polite presentation of the bill, Moaz Moustafa, SETF Executive Director, said: “We are proud to see legislation that holds the Assad regime and those normalizing with war criminals accountable” as a response to the passage of the bill.
Similarly, on the House floor, House Foreign Relations Committee chairman Mike McCaul announced that “Congress is sending a message that it remains committed to justice for the Syrian people.”
THE BILL’S TRUE AIMS
While the stated aims seem to be focused on accountability and human rights, the real thrust of the bill was conveniently left unmentioned in the SETF and house representatives’ celebratory posts on X (formerly Twitter).
One line, deep within the 22-page bill, reads: “Section 7438 of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 is amended by striking ‘the date that is 5 years after the date of the enactment of this Act’ and inserting ‘December 31, 2032.’” This hidden line, left out of all the explainer content dished out by SETF and SAC, extends the Caesar Act, set to expire in 2024, for eight more years.
The perversely named Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 has immiserated the more than 12 million Syrian people living under the government of Syria. Since the enactment of the Act, the percentage of the Syrian population below the poverty line has reached 90%, 600,000 Syrian children’s growth was stunted, and cases of anemia in pregnant and breastfeeding women saw a 60% rise.
Described as “unprecedented,” as one of the “strictest and most complex collective regimes in recent history,” and as the “most complicated and far-reaching sanctions regimes ever imposed,” the Syrian groups pushing for Caesar’s eight-year extension understandably shied away from mentioning the most crucial part of this new bill, even though they helped provide Syrian cover for its passing.
None of the four articles written by the SETF mention the extension of the Caesar Sanctions to 2032
As for normalization, although the bill purports to impose only a U.S. policy of wholesale rejection of normalization with the Syrian government, in reality, the bill lists several measures that would threaten a whole list of other countries wishing to restore diplomatic relations with Syria.
The bill calls on the Secretary of State to submit an annual report to Congress detailing a “strategy to describe and counter actions taken or planned by foreign governments to normalize, engage with, or upgrade political, diplomatic, or economic ties with the regime led by Bashar al-Assad in Syria.” This annual report must also include “a full list of diplomatic meetings at the Ambassador level or above, between the Syrian regime and any representative of the Governments” mentioned.
The report must also include a list of any transaction of $500,000 or more between any “foreign person located in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, or Lebanon” and any “recipient in any area of Syria held by the Assad regime.”
SANCTIONING SYRIA: A WASHINGTON TRADITION
H.R. 3202 is not the first, nor will it be the last, sanctions bill to target Syria. The economic war that the United States has been waging against Syria started long before a Tunisian banana salesman self-immolated, launching what would come to be known as the Arab Spring.
In 1973, as the October War was waging, Henry Kissinger was perfecting his shuttle diplomacy in hopes of breaking the thorn that was former Syrian President Hafez Al Assad. Kissinger tried everything in his arsenal to get the then-Syrian president to abandon the military struggle and resistance of alliances he was waging against the U.S. presence in the Middle East, particularly Israel.
Upon failing to sway Assad’s Syria from supporting Hezbollah, Palestinian Jihad, Hamas, and other resistance groups, and once Syria’s position was weakened by the Egyptian signing of the 1978 Camp David Accords, the ire of the U.S. State Department and Treasury, fell upon the Arab Republic.
Syria’s name was written atop the inaugural “State Sponsors of Terrorism” (SST) list in 1979, along with Iraq, Libya, and South Yemen. Today, Syria remains the only inaugural member still on the list, sharing the limelight with newly added countries: Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.
A timeline showing the membership of the US State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Source | Wikipedia
For the past 45 years since Syria made it on the SST list, the sanctions have never stopped. Below is a summarized list of all the sanctions that have been progressively levied upon the country of Syria and its people:
In 1979, the Export Administration Act added Syria to the SST and thus restricted Syria from receiving foreign assistance funds from the United States. The Act added that the Secretary of State must notify Congress before licensing the export of goods or technology worth more than $7 million to Syria.
In 1985, the threshold for notifying Congress before licensing the export of goods or technology to Syria was lowered from $7 million to $1 million.
In 1989, the threshold for notifying Congress before licensing the export of goods or technology to Syria was lowered from $1 million to any value.
In 1994, an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 mandated that the United States withhold a proportionate share of funding and contributions to international organizations for programs that benefit Syria.
Once the uprisings of the Arab Spring reached Syria, the trickle of sanctions became a flood, and a bevy of bills and executive orders levied an array of sanctions on multitudes of industries in Syria, all culminating in the 2019 Caesar Civilian Protection Act.
Today, Syria is the most heavily sanctioned country per capita in the world. Falling third behind only Russia (after the Ukraine war) and Iran. Syria, however, is much smaller than the valedictorian and salutatorian of U.S. sanctions and orders of magnitude worse off economically, therefore desperately tethered to the international export-import economy for its survival and more vulnerable to the damage of sanctions.
WHO’S RESPONSIBLE FOR THE TRADITION OF SANCTIONS?
Although H.R. 3202 is not the first bill sanctioning Syria, it shares a crucial element with all its predecessor bills that have targeted Syria for the past half-century: the Israel Lobby.
The 1979 bill that introduced Syria to the cruel reality of sanctions was a direct response to Syria’s role in the October War of liberation waged against Israel and for Syria’s unwavering support of the Palestinian resistance.
The SALSRA Act of 2003 and the Caesar Civilian Protection Act of 2019 – the second and first most robust sanctions bills imposed upon Syria, respectively – were both written by Eliot Engels, a former Democratic congressman from the Bronx.
Engels, a New York Democrat accused of tax fraud, is one of the top recipients of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) money in Congress, with a total of $1,847,342 raised from the Zionist PAC.
OpenSecret’s profile of former Congressman Eliot Engel’s campaign fundraising sources
As a member of the Arab-Israeli Peace Accord Monitoring Group, Congressional Hellenic-Israeli Alliance, and the Israel Allies Caucus, Engels is perhaps the foremost supporter of Israel amongst his Democrat peers.
One of the first bills he introduced was to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. He also wrote a resolution condemning a United Nations Security Council Resolution that condemned illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and was one of the few Democrats who broke rank and voted with their Republican peers to kill a bill that would have banned the sale of U.S. made-cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia – cluster bombs that would later be dropped on Yemeni civilians by the monarchy.
Eliot Engel, center, greets Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz, left, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 27, 2015. Carolyn Kaster | AP
OpenSecret’s profile of South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson’s campaign fundraising sources
Wilson, a South Carolina Republican who cut his teeth as a young aide working for civil rights opponent Strom Thurmond and later defended his legacy, has also been one of the most ardent supporters of Israel in Congress throughout his service.
In an interview with AIPAC, Wilson, who also serves as the chair of the Middle East and North Africa subcommittee, Global Counter Terrorism Committee member, and House Committee on Foreign Affairs member, raised the alarm about threats posed by Iran and the Houthis towards Israel and the United States. He added that he is “grateful for the military service and what America has provided for the world.” So extensive is Wilson’s dedication to the cause of Israel that he once bragged that a Jewish person described him as “a real mensch,” Yiddish nomenclature meaning ‘a person of honor.’
SYRIAN WINDOW DRESSING
Even the facade of faux grassroots Syrian support that was put forth for H.R. 3202 has shady links to account for its advocacy of regime change and rampant sanctions.
The Syrian Emergency Task Force has been widely documented to have direct funding links to the U.S. State Department and extensive ties to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and AIPAC. The group was condemned for its incessant push to get the Obama Administration to launch a Libya, or even Iraq-style invasion of Syria in order to force a regime change.
Mouaz Moustafa (left) stands with Mike Pompeo, second right, and Joe Wilson, right, at an event condemning the Syrian government. Source | Twitter
As journalist Max Blumenthal documented for Mondoweiss magazine, SETF has publicly celebrated a donation of $1 million from Cuba regime change organizations in a post on their website that has since been removed.
As for the neocon-aligned 501 (c) Syrian American Council (SAC), a more bloodthirsty front organization for regime change war could not be found. In 2018, as a response to the now debunked Douma chemical attacks, the SAC urged President Trump to “follow through on his tweets Sunday morning, and to take immediate action against this tyrannical regime…by grounding Assad’s air force.”
In 2017, the SAC publicly lamented Trump’s refusal to continue the Obama administration CIA funding program of Jihadist terrorists in Syria, claiming that the $1 billion a year program “was always too weak to tip the scales.”
SYRIAN CIVILIANS: NOT AN AMERICAN PRIORITY
After the death toll of Palestinian children in Gaza reached a staggering 12,000, skepticism arises when observing the Permanent U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas, vetoing a fourth U.N. Security Resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. It becomes evident that the U.S. establishment’s concern for the lives of the Syrian people, let alone non-Israelis in the Middle East, is dubious at best.
US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield raises her hand in opposition to a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, February 20, 2024. Photo | Yomiuri Shimbun via AP
Lastly, observers noting the statements of Dana Stroul – Democratic co-chair of the bipartisan Syria Study Group (2018-2020), former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East (2021-2023), and current researcher at WINEP – discussing the “rubble” that the U.S. intends to keep Syria in and the “leverage” it plans to maintain over Syria, grasp that the policy of sanctioning Syria and obstructing reconstruction has long been endorsed by the bipartisan consensus in Washington. The driving force behind these detrimental policies has consistently been neoconservative regime change proponents and individuals affiliated with pro-Zionist think tanks.
Biden official Dana Stroul in 2019: via military occupation, US "owns" Syria’s "resource-rich" "economic powerhouse" region. And via sanctions, it can "preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back", leaving Syria in "rubble." pic.twitter.com/WmZSfvXrKR
In an interview with Joshua Landis, one of the few Independent U.S. experts on Syria, Landis shared his opinion on the crass and transparent language used by the likes of Jeffrey and Stroul, telling MintPress,
They’re saying that even if we don’t succeed in getting rid of Assad.. At least we lock [Syria] into a stalemate… A stalemate that denies Iran and Russia a strategic Victory.”
In describing the U.S.’ long-term goals in Syria to MintPress, Landis evokes the Arabic word for swamp or mustanka’a. “The long-term goal of America is to deny Syria as a strategic asset that’s got some money, and that can help [Russia and Iran], and so keep it as poor as possible and make it mustanka’a,” Landis concluded.
LONG TERM DAMAGE
The Anti-Assad Regime Normalization Bill is the latest in a series of measures that the U.S. has taken against the Syrian people for the crime of winning a regime-change war imposed upon them.
The U.S. hypocrisy on the global stage is now clearly evident to all who wish to see it. While the U.S. condemns and sanctions Venezuela for barring an opposition leader convicted of treason from running in the upcoming election, it supports and even provides IMF loans for Pakistan even after the latter ousted its democratically elected leader who chose neutrality in the Ukraine war.
The U.S. system of rules-based order that has prevailed since 1945 with the establishment of the Bretton Woods Institutions is slowly unraveling. The dollar’s strength is waning, and the bite of U.S. unilateral sanctions has become duller over the years, as evidenced by the failure of the Russian sanctions regime.
While the U.S. will undoubtedly succeed in causing another generation of Syrian kids’s growth to be stunted, and while it will succeed in bringing more Syrian families below the poverty line during the coming eight years of Caesar Sanctions, it is all the while wrecking any semblance of credibility it might still have on the global stage, and – most unfortunate as Joshua Landis surmised while sharing his thoughts on the new bill – losing its identity along the way.
Through much of American history, America believed that a stronger middle class made democracy and contributed stability in the world. But with this promiscuous use of sanctions, America is betraying its own values to lift people into the middle class. And now by trying to drive them into poverty, and using sanctions as a central instrument of its foreign policy, it’s creating deeper anger, and impoverished people who are less educated, and less capable of competing in the modern world. In theory, all this is to promote democracy or Justice … but of course it’s not going to do that. It’s just going to make people more desperate, more Islamist, and more available to radical ideologies.”
Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News
Republish our stories! MintPress News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.’ His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Law number one in the ‘law of holes’ is that “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” Law number two, “If you are not digging, you are still in a hole.”
These adages sum up Israel’s ongoing political, military and strategic crises, 100 days following the start of the war on Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was faced with the unprecedented challenge of having to react to a major attack launched by Palestinian Resistance in southern Israel on October 7.
This single event is already proving to be a game changer in the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Its impact will be felt for many years, if not generations, to come.
Netanyahu was already in a hole long before the Al-Aqsa Flood operation took place, and he had no one else to blame but himself.
To stay in power and to avoid three major corruption cases and subsequent trials, Netanyahu labored to fortify his position at the helm of Israeli politics with the help of the most extreme government ever assembled in a state whose very existence is an outcome of an extremist ideology.
Even the anti-Netanyahu mass protests throughout Israel, which also took place for months before the war, did not alert the Israeli leader that the hole was getting deeper and that the Palestinians, living under a perpetual military occupation and siege, could find in Israel’s political and military crises an opportunity.
He simply kept on digging.
October 7 should not be perceived as a surprise attack since the entire Gaza Division, the massive Israeli military build-up in the Gaza envelope, exists for the very purpose of ensuring that Gaza’s subjugation and siege were perfected according to state-of-the-art military technology.
This advanced military capability meant that no surprise attacks should have been possible because it is not humans but sophisticated machines that scan, intercept, and report on every perceived suspicious movement. In the Israeli case, the failure was profound and multi-layered.
Subsequently, following October 7, Netanyahu found himself in a much deeper hole. Instead of finding his way out by, for example, taking responsibility, unifying his people, or, God forbid, acknowledging that war is never an answer in the face of a resisting, oppressed population, he kept on digging.
The Israeli leader, flanked by far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and Amichai Eliyahu, worsened matters by using the war on Gaza as an opportunity to implement long-dormant plans of ethnically cleansing Palestinians, not only from the Gaza Strip but also the West Bank.
Were it not for the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and strong rejection by Egypt and Jordan, the second Nakba would have been a reality.
All mainstream Israeli politicians, despite their ideological and political differences, unanimously outdid one another in their racist, violent, and even genocidal language. While Defense Minister Yoav Gallant immediately announced that “there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed” to the Gaza population, Avi Dichter called for “another Nakba.”
Meanwhile, Eliyahu suggested the ‘option’ of “dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza.”
Instead of saving Israel from itself by reminding the Tel Aviv government that the genocidal war on Gaza would also bode poorly for Tel Aviv, the US Biden Administration served the role of cheerleader and outright partner.
Aside from an additional $14 billion of emergency aid package, Washington has reportedly sent, as of December 25, 230 airplanes and 20 ships loaded with armaments and munitions.
According to a New York Times report on January 12, the CIA is also actively involved in collecting information from Gaza and providing that intelligence to Israel.
US support for Israel, in all its forms, has been maintained despite the shocking reports issued by every respected international charity that operates in Palestine and the Middle East.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said that 1.9 million out of Gaza’s entire population of 2.3 million people have been displaced. Israeli rights group B’tselem said that 2.2 million are starving. Save the Children reported that over 100 Palestinian children are killed daily. Gaza’s government media office has said that about 70 percent of the Strip has been destroyed.
Even the Wall Street Journal concluded that the destruction of Gaza was greater than that of Dresden in WWII.
Yet, none of this concerned US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited the region five times in less than 100 days with the same message of support for Israel.
What is so astonishing, however, is that Gaza’s threshold of resilience continues to prove unequaled. This is how determined the Palestinians are to achieve their freedom finally.
Indeed, fathers or mothers, in a scene repeated numerous times, would be carrying the bodies of their dead children while howling in pain, yet insisting that they would never leave their homeland.
This dignified pain has moved the world. Even though Washington has ensured no meaningful action will be taken at the UN Security Council, countries like South Africa sought the help of the world’s highest court to demand an immediate end to the war and to recognize Israel’s atrocities as an act of genocide.
South Africa’s efforts at the International Court of Justice soon galvanized other countries, mainly in the Global South.
But Netanyahu kept on digging, unmoved, or possibly unaware that the world around him was finally beginning to truly understand the generational suffering of the Palestinians.
The Israeli leader still speaks of ‘voluntary migration,’ of wanting to manage Gaza and Palestine, and of reshaping the Middle East in ways consistent with his illusions of grandeur and power.
One hundred days of the war on Gaza has taught us that superior firepower no longer influences outcomes when a nation makes the collective decision to resist.
It has also taught us that the US can no longer reorder the Middle East to fit Israeli priorities and that relatively small countries in the Global South when united, can alter the course of history.
Netanyahu may continue digging, but history has already been written: the spirit of the Palestinian people has won over Israel’s death machine.
Israeli captive being released by Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters at Rafah Crossing during the fifth release on Tuesday, November 28, 2023.
The temporary ceasefire in Gaza entered its sixth and last day on Wednesday, with reports on extending the truce for the second time being leaked. As the sixth release of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners is in process, leaks come out that there are negotiations between the Zionist entity and Hamas to release additional captives and extend the ceasefire by another five days.
According to leaks reported by Al-Jazeera, talks on truce extension tackled doing this “over five categories: Israeli captives; elderly men who are too old to be reservists; female soldiers; reservist soldiers; and then the bodies of Israelis who were killed before or during captivity.”
“There seem to be positive noises coming from Hamas about this, as well,” Al-Jazeera added, noting that “there’s a lot of pressure from the right-wing in Israel, which actually controls the government, that this ceasefire should not go on indefinitely.”
Meanwhile, the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation reported that occupation authorities are looking into another extension of the truce.
“It depends on the conduct of Hamas,” an Israeli political official was quoted as saying.
Qatar, which mediated the truce deal, hosted on Tuesday the heads of Israeli Mossad and the CIA for talks.
Sixth Release
Another 30 Palestinian prisoners will be released on Wednesday for 10 Israeli captives, media reported.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement it has received a list with the names of Israelis that Hamas is slated to release later today, the sixth group of hostages to be freed as part of the temporary truce.
The Israeli statement said the “families of those on the list have been informed,” without giving further details.
Earlier on Tuesday, the fifth batch of prisoners were released as part of the swap deal. Hamas released 10 Israeli hostages and two Thai nationals, in exchange for 30 Palestinian prisoners.
The Israeli captives were handed over by Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades and ally Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades to the Red Cross.
The Palestinian Prisoner’s Club said 15 women and 15 minors were freed.
Upon his liberation from the Israel occupation prisons through the resistance deal, the first words from the father of the prisoner, young Qassam Attoun, were filled with concern: 'Where did your weight disappear? They don't feed you, do they?'
On the other hand, several shooting incidents were reported by Israeli occupation army across the Gaza Strip in violation of the temporary ceasefire.
Israeli forces “opened fire on a Palestinian boat that was trying to go out into the open sea from the shores of Deir el-Balah. The boat returned to the shore,” Amir Bohbot, correspondent for the Israeli Walla news website, said, noting that the shooting is the second incident on Wednesday.
Gaza neighborhood that have been heavily damaged by Israeli bombardment.
Earlier, three Palestinians were wounded, one seriously, as occupation forces in Beit Hanoun opened fire at them in the northern region of the besieged strip.
Catastrophic Humanitarian Situation
The Director General of hospitals in Gaza Mohammad Zaqout said that hospitals in the strip’s north including Al-Shifa, Kamal Adwan, and al-Ahli hospitals have yet to receive fuel.
He added that Field hospitals coming into Gaza are currently are not in service despite an urgent need for them.
A Palestinian boy rests on a mattress near the ruins of destrpyed houses in Gaza (November 28, 2023 / photo by Reuters).
The official warned that the lack of water and hygiene-related materials will increase the risk of epidemics.
For its part, UN’s World Food Program (WFP) said that aids delivered to Gaza are wholly insufficient to deal with level of hunger.
The organization warned that humanitarian situation in Gaza is catastrophic, and that “we are facing the risk of famine.”
“6 days are not enough to deliver the needed aid, people of Gaza deficient in food,” WFP added.
Since Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza began, Zionist officials, pundits, journalists, and their Western opposite numbers have endlessly invoked the sinister specter of “terrorism” to justify the industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians. It is because of “terrorism,” twice-failed U.S. Presidential candidate and unconvicted war criminal Hillary Clinton representatively wrote for The Atlantic on November 14 that “Hamas must be permanently erased.” Destroyed hospitals and schools and civilians killed en masse are reasonable “collateral damage.” Such is the unparalleled evil of “terrorists.”
Yet, the relentless stream of heart-rending clips documenting the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) Holocaust deluging social media feeds the world over, and the ever-ratcheting child death toll has compelled countless citizens to ask, “If Hamas are terrorists, then what are Zionists?” It is surely no coincidence YouTube recently yanked the official video of a groundbreaking track by renowned rapper and MintPress News contributor Lowkey, “Terrorist?” posing this precise question.
“Terrorist?” was released in 2011, at the height of the U.S. Empire’s “War on Terror.” Then, the purported global threat of “terrorism” was exploited throughout the West to savage civil liberties at home and wage relentless illegal military “interventions” abroad. Mainstream usage of the term precipitously plummeted thereafter. It is only now regaining popular currency due to the Gaza genocide.
This is no accident. As we shall see, Israel – and specifically its veteran leader, Benjamin Netanyahu – was fundamental to concocting the mainstream conception of “terrorism,” explicitly to delegitimize anti-imperial struggles while validating Western state violence directed at oppressed peoples across the Global South. The impact of this informational assault can be felt in every corner of the world today – not least Gaza.
In fact, one might reasonably conclude the specific foundations of Nakba 2.0, which is unfolding in grisly real-time right now, were laid decades ago as a result of the connivances of Netanyahu, the international Zionist lobby, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. What follows is the little-known history of how “terrorism” came to be. A majority of the world’s population – the Palestinian people in particular – live with the mephitic consequences every day.
IT BEGINS…
Our story starts in 1976, at the peak of détente between the U.S. and Soviet Union. After two-and-a-half decades of bitter enmity, the two superpowers resolved to peaceful coexistence at the start of the decade. They collaborated to systematically dismantle the structures and doctrines that defined the immediate post-World War II era, such as Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.).
In May of that year, the CIA produced its annual National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a comprehensive report combining data from various intelligence agencies intended to be a basis for crafting foreign policy. In keeping with the past five years, it concluded the Soviets were in severe economic decline, favored diplomacy over conflict, and desperately sought an end to the Cold War. Such findings lay behind Washington’s push for détente and Moscow’s eager acceptance of major disarmament and arms control treaties.
However, newly-appointed CIA director George H. W. Bush categorically rejected these conclusions. He sought a second opinion and constructed an independent intelligence cell to review the NIE. Known as Team B, it was composed of hardcore Cold Warriors, defense-industry-funded hawks, and rabid anti-Communists. Among them were several individuals who would become leading figures in the neoconservative movement, such as Paul Wolfowitz. Also present were the infamous CIA and Pentagon dark arts specialists who had been professionally ostracized due to détente.
Team B duly reviewed the NIE and rubbished each and every one of the Agency’s findings. Rather than dilapidated, impoverished and teetering on total collapse, the Soviet Union was, in fact, more deadly and dangerous than ever, having constructed a vast array of “first strike” capabilities right under the CIA’s collective nose. To reach these bombshell conclusions, Team B relied on a confounding hodgepodge of peculiar logical fallacy, paranoid theorizing, crazed conspiratorial conjecture, unsupported value judgments, and amateurish circular reasoning.
Then-CIA director George H.W. Bush looks over a map of Beirut, Lebanon, with President Gerald Ford. Photo | CIA Archives
For example, Team B repeatedly assessed that a lack of evidence Moscow possessed weapons systems, military technology, or surveillance capabilities comparable or superior to Washington’s own was inverse proof the Soviets, in fact, did. They were so sophisticated and innovative, Team B concluded, that they couldn’t be detected or even comprehended by the West. Team B’s analysis was confirmed to be a total fantasy when the USSR collapsed. Yet, its methods informed all subsequent NIEs throughout the Cold War and likely endure today.
On June 27 of that year, mere weeks after Team B was set to work on reigniting the Cold War, Air France Flight 139, en route to Paris from Tel Aviv, was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Redirected to a Ugandan airport, the plane was greeted on the runway by Idi Amin’s military, who ushered the passengers – the majority of whom were Jewish or Israeli – into the terminal, watched over by scores of soldiers, intended to prevent their escape or rescue.
The hijackers relayed a demand to the government of Israel. Unless a ransom of $5 million was paid to them and 53 Palestinian prisoners were released from jail, the hostages would be executed. In response, 100 elite IOF commandos launched an audacious action to free the hostages. Their mission – known as the Entebbe Raid – was a stunning success. All but four hostages were rescued alive, and the IOF lost just one commander – Yonatan (Jonathan) Netanyahu, the older brother of Israel’s sitting Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
‘PROPAGANDA TO DEHUMANIZE’
For years, by that point, Israeli officials had been attempting to popularize the term “terrorism” to explain the motivations and actions of Palestinian freedom fighters. That way, their righteous fury at repression could be reframed as a destructive ideology of violence for violence’s sake without rationale and Zionist colonial tyranny as warranted self-defense. This effort became turbocharged in September 1972, when the kidnapping of 11 Israeli athletes at that year’s Olympics in Munich by Palestinian militants ended with all hostages murdered.
This particularly public bloodshed centered world attention on Israel and left Western citizens wondering what could’ve possibly inspired such actions. Zionists had hitherto managed to largely conceal their systematic, state-enforced repression and displacement of Palestinians from the outside world. Journalists were kept well away from the scenes of major crimes. At the same time, Amnesty International’s Israeli branch was secretly financed and directed by Tel Aviv’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to whitewash facts on the ground.
For the Netanyahu family, the Entebbe raid was a tragedy – but also an ideal opportunity to validate and internationalize the concept of “terrorism,” as espoused by Zionists. In 1979, Benjamin Netanyahu founded the Jonathan Institute in honor of his slain brother. Its purpose, he said, was:
“To focus public attention on the grave threat that international terrorism poses to all democratic societies, to study the real nature of today’s terrorism, and to propose measures for combating and defeating the international terror movements.”
In 1983 Netanyahu explained what terrorism is not
If you miss a target and a bomb accidentally falls on a Children's hospital it's not terrorism Does it hold true in 2023!!! pic.twitter.com/6DiHRv0IKk
In July that year, the Institute convened the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism (JCIT) in Jerusalem’s Hilton Hotel. It gathered together a 700-strong mob of Israeli government officials, U.S. lawmakers, intelligence operatives from across the ‘Five Eyes’ global spying network, and Western foreign policy apparatchiks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many representatives of Team B were in attendance. For four days and seven separate sessions, speaker after speaker painted a disturbing picture of the worldwide phenomenon of “terrorism.”
They unanimously declared that all “terrorists” constituted a single, organized political movement that was being secretly financed, armed, trained, and directed by the Soviet Union. This devilish nexus, it was claimed, posed a mortal threat to Western democracy, freedom, and security, requiring a coordinated response. Eerily, as academic Diana Ralph later observed, the JCIT’s collective prescription for tackling this purported menace was precisely what transpired just over two decades later during the “War on Terror”.
“[This included] pre-emptive attacks on states that are alleged to support ‘terrorists’; an elaborate intelligence system apparatus; slashed civil liberties, particularly for Palestinians targeted as potential terrorists, including detention without charge, and torture; and propaganda to dehumanize ‘terrorists’ in the eyes of the public.”
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin addressed the JCIT’s opening session. He set the tone by claiming Western state violence was ultimately “a fight for freedom or liberation” and, therefore, fundamentally opposed to “terrorism.” He concluded his remarks by imploring the assembled throng to go forth and promote the conference’s message once it was over. And they did.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin addressed the JCIT’s opening session. He set the tone by claiming Western state violence was ultimately “a fight for freedom or liberation” and, therefore, fundamentally opposed to “terrorism.” He concluded his remarks by imploring the assembled throng to go forth and promote the conference’s message once it was over. And they did.
‘THE TERROR NETWORK’
Among the JCIT attendees was American author and journalist Claire Sterling, who cut her teeth as a reporter decades earlier at the Overseas News Agency, an MI6 propaganda operation seeking to boost U.S. public support for entering World War II. Following the conference, she frequently amplified the claims of JCIT speakers in articles for prominent newspapers, leading to an epic March 1981 front-page exposé in The New York Times, “Terrorism: Tracing The International Network.”
A book published later that year, “The Terror Network,” expanded significantly on Sterling’s oeuvre and firmly cemented the notion of Moscow as a grand spider sat in the middle of a vast, globe-spanning web of deadly political violence in the Western public mind. It caused a sensation upon release, receiving rave reviews from major news outlets, being translated into 22 languages, and becoming a bestseller in several countries.
Most significantly of all, “The Terror Network” had a particularly potent impact on newly-inaugurated President Ronald Reagan and his CIA chief William Casey. Committed anti-Communists, they entered office desperately seeking a pretext for brutally crushing left-wing, nationalist opposition to U.S. imperialism in Latin America. Sterling’s work provided ample ammunition for achieving that bloodsoaked objective and was key to the White House decisively shattering détente, a process begun by Team B five years earlier.
Consequently, “The Terror Network” was circulated among U.S. lawmakers and heavily promoted overseas on the Reagan administration’s dime. Casey furthermore tasked his Agency with verifying its thesis. They quickly assessed Sterling’s work to be irredeemable garbage, ironically enough, as it was heavily influenced by CIA black propaganda. Enraged, Casey demanded the evaluation be revised. An updated appraisal was less scathing but nonetheless stressed the book was “uneven and the reliability of its sources varies widely,” while “significant portions” were “incorrect.”
Still dissatisfied, Casey asked a CIA “senior review panel” charged with scrutinizing Langley’s formal estimates to write their own report on the subject. They concluded the Soviets did offer limited financial, material and practical assistance to a handful of anti-imperial Global South liberation movements, some of which were labeled “terrorists” by Western powers. But there was “insufficient evidence” of Muscovite culpability for the entire global phenomenon of “terrorism,” let alone funding and directing such entities as dedicated policy.
Undeterred, when Casey personally delivered the report to Reagan, he allegedly said of its findings, “Of course, Mr. President, you and I know better.” So it was CIA-backed death squads that ran roughshod across Washington’s “backyard” throughout the 1980s in the name of neutralizing Soviet influence in the region. Their actions were heavily informed by the Agency’s guerrilla warfare manual, which encouraged assassinations of government officials and civilian leaders and deadly attacks on “soft targets” such as schools and hospitals. “Terrorism,” in other words.
‘WE ARE ALL PALESTINIANS’
Another example of Reagan’s “terrorism” was sponsoring Afghanistan’s Mujahideen resistance fighters in their battle with – ironically enough – the Soviet Red Army. This policy endured after the “Evil Empire” was vanquished. The same militants were transported to Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s to aid and abet the painful, forced death of Yugoslavia.
When these covert actions produced “blowback” in the form of the 9/11 attacks, several individuals who attended the JCIT, and their acolytes, were elevated to the Bush administration due to their supposed “terrorism” expertise. Meanwhile, with public and state-level fears of “terrorism” ramping up significantly the world over, many Western countries turned to Israel for advice and guidance on how to tackle the issue. As Nentyahu commented in 2008:
“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq.”
Netanyahu shows reporters a copy of a Syrian passport allegedly found on a Palestinian fighter that washed ashore in Gaza, 1991. Jerome Delay | AP
It is not for nothing that graphic videos showcasing IOF “surgical strikes” on Palestinians, their homes, schools, and hospitals are proudly displayed at international arms fairs, and private demonstrations of invasive surveillance tools such as Pegasus routinely wow repressive foreign security and intelligence agencies behind-closed-doors.
On top of a significant financial benefit, there is a diplomatic dividend, too. Israel secures an invaluable censure-stifling goodwill from customers, therefore permitting the Zionist project of permanently purging Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants to persist untrammeled. We see a palpable demonstration of this currently. While the streets of almost every major Western city have regularly teemed with pro-Palestine fervor ever since the latest attack on Gaza began, the protesters’ elected representatives are at best silent, at worst, actively complicit.
Impassioned chants of “We are all Palestinians!” have been a frequent fixture at these events. This rallying call is highly apposite, for in addition to expressing sympathy and solidarity with the Palestinian people, it is urgently incumbent upon us all to reflect that the very same techniques and technologies of control and oppression to which they have been so cruelly subjected daily for decades are now firmly trained on us as well, as a result of Israel’s invention of “terrorism.” As such, it is no exaggeration to say Palestinians are canaries in the coalmine of humanity.
Hersh also notes there is no interest in peace talks Ukraine’s claims of incremental progress in the offensive constitute of “all lies”.
Citing a US official familiar with current intelligence, US journalist Seymour Hersh said that the US intelligence believes that the Ukrainian forces have become demoralized and have no chance of winning, adding that there currently exists no discussion in Kiev or the White House regarding a ceasefire.
In a new post on his Substack account, Hersh said, “There are significant elements in the American intelligence community, relying on field reports and technical intelligence, who believe that the demoralized Ukraine army has given up on the possibility of overcoming the heavily mined three-tier Russian defense lines and taking the war to Crimea and the four oblasts seized and annexed by Russia. The reality is that Volodymyr Zelensky’s battered army no longer has any chance of a victory”.
Hersh also noted there is no interest in peace talks. Quoting the official, Hersh continued that Ukraine’s claims of incremental progress in the offensive constitute of “all lies”.
The renowned investigative journalist reported last month that the CIA informed US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the Ukrainian counteroffensive would not likely yield results.
This information, said Hersh, came from a US intelligence official, who stated more specifically, that “the word was getting to him [Blinken] through the Agency [CIA] that the Ukrainian offense was not going to work. It was a show by Zelensky and there were some in the administration who believed his bullshit.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has been calling on his Western allies for months to provide his military with long-range missiles, arguing that this could drastically improve the outcome of the counteroffensive. But before that, it was the anti-air missiles, the advanced offense tanks, heavily armored troop carriers, and the HIMARS system.
Ukraine is depleting resources at an unsustainable rate, firing 90,000 artillery rounds per month when the Pentagon is only capable of producing a third of that number, while also losing around 20 percent of NATO-provided weapons – that were either destroyed or damaged – within the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, which saw very limited ground gains since it was launched almost three months ago.
As the Draconian Western-led sanctions on Russia exacerbate the economic crisis worldwide, and as Russian troops gain more ground despite the influx of military aid into Ukraine, exposing US direct involvement in bio-labs spread across Eastern Europe and the insurgence of neo-Nazi groups… How will things unfold?
Foreign intelligence agencies, including Israeli and US intel and their regional partners, have been instrumental in fueling recent anti-government protests in Suwayda, just as they did in 2011.
On 17 August, anti-government protests erupted in Suwayda, a province in southern Syria with a Druze-majority population. These demonstrations were triggered by the Syrian government’s decision to lift fuel subsidies, which came amidst a severe economic crisis exacerbated by US economic sanctions.
Hundreds of Syrians burnt tires, blocked roads, and chanted anti-government slogans in Al-Karama Square in Suwayda’s city center.
Protesters shouted, “Long live Syria and down with [Syrian President] Bashar al Assad,” which, according to Reuters, echoed “chants from 2011 pro-democracy protests that were violently crushed by security forces and sparked a long-running conflict.”
References to the protests in 2011, and the bloody 12-year war that followed are important, but not for the reasons Reuters suggests.
Suwayda then and now
Contrary to the mainstream view, the anti-government demonstrations in 2011 were not popular, peaceful protests demanding democracy. As detailed elsewhere, the protests were sparked by US and allied intelligence agencies seeking regime change in Damascus. The CIA and Saudi intelligence flooded Syria with Al-Qaeda militants from Iraq and Lebanon who infiltrated protests to attack Syrian police, soldiers, and security officials.
According to an informed source speaking with The Cradle, the protests are driven primarily by groups enjoying support from US and Israeli intelligence, namely the Men of Dignity and the Brigade Party.
According to the source, “everyone is aware of the role they played and continue to play” in Suwayda.
The Men of Dignity, or Rijaal al-Karama, group was formed by an obscure Druze religious figure, Wahid Balous, shortly after the US-led covert war on Syria began in 2011.
“Balous was an unknown cleric before the [war],” one of his associates toldThe New Arab in 2015. Three years earlier, “His name began to emerge with the rise of armed groups affiliated to sheikhs who said they were neither in the opposition nor the pro-government camp.”
Al-Jazeera also reported in 2015 that “Syria’s Druze are not fully supportive of Balous,” including some who “questioned his political agenda.”
“He openly declared himself opposed to Israel, but his close relations with Israeli Druze, who are linked to Israeli intelligence and the military establishment, raised fears that he might have been manipulated,” said one activist from Suwayda, quoted by the Qatari outlet.
The informed source speaking with The Cradle also highlights the role of Israeli intelligence in establishing the Men of Dignity with the help of Israeli Druze figures.
“The Men of Dignity are influenced and mobilized by the Mossad, and there is a role for Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif, the head of the spiritual council for Syria’s Druze,” the source states.
Israeli involvement in Druze affairs
While the Druze community in Suwayda and in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights are traditionally strong supporters of the Syrian government, some Druze elements in Israel are Zionists and support the Jewish state.
Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif has publicly expressed his strong support for Zionism and the Israeli state, while prominent Druze politician Ayoob Kara is a member of the Likud Party, founded by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Given this context, it’s not surprising that Israel has been involved in efforts to sow chaos and promote separatism among the Druze in Syria, as outlined in Oded Yinon’s 1982 plan of breaking up Baathist Syria into ethnic mini-states, including a Druze state, as a primary Zionist objective.
As part of the establishment of the Men of Dignity in 2012, Balous established a militia allegedly devoted to protecting the Druze community during the ongoing war between the government and foreign-backed Salafist armed groups, including the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front.
According to sources from Suwayda speaking with Al-Jazeera, Balous commanded between 500 and 1,000 fighters.
This can be compared with the strength of the pro-government Druze militias active in Syria at the time.
Al-Jazeera notes that roughly 8,000 Druze fighters were then affiliated with the National Defense Forces (NDF), the Popular Committees, Dara al-Watan (Shield of the Homeland), and the armed wing of Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP).
According to the informed source speaking with The Cradle, Balous’ militia obtained their weapons from Israel via the Nusra Front – since rebranded as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
In 2014, opposition activists close to the FSA acknowledged the Israeli air force bombed Syrian army positions in Quneitra near the Golan Heights in support of Nusra.
Between 2015 and 2017, reports from the Wall Street Journal and UN peacekeeping troops patrolling the Golan Heights border fence revealed that Israel was supporting Nusra and allied FSA factions in southern Syria. Israel provided funds to pay salaries and buy weapons for armed groups while bringing Nusra fighters across the Golan border fence for treatment in Israeli hospitals.
Anger at Israeli support for Nusra caused Druze residents in the town of Majdal al-Shams, located on the Israeli side of the Golan border fence, to attack Israeli ambulances carrying Nusra fighters.
Israeli support for Nusra was further documented by the Druze activist Sidqi al-Maqt, who also hailed from Majd al-Shams. Maqt had been imprisoned for 27 years by Israel for resisting its occupation of the Golan Heights.
After his release in 2012, Maqt documented contacts between the Israeli army and Nusra in posts on social media. As a result, he was arrested again in 2015 and spent another five years in an occupation prison.
Collaboration and conscription
In June 2015, Balous and his militia were criticized for undermining the Syrian army and collaborating with the Nusra Front. At the time, Syria’s Druze community was facing its worst threat from the Israeli-backed Nusra Front and allied FSA since the start of the war.
Al-Jazeerareported that “Some criticized [Balous’] attacks on government checkpoints, and according to sources in Sweida, many questioned the absence of his militia when armed opposition groups launched a large-scale attack on the Thaaleh airbase in Sweida.”
Balous’ collaboration with the so-called rebels of Nusra and the FSA was evidenced further by a report from the Lebanese Daily Star. The Lebanese paper reported that “FSA spokesman, Yassin al-Hariri, pledged that if Thaaleh airport is seized by the rebels, it will be turned over to Balous’ Dignity Sheikhs group.”
The Nusra and FSA attack came at a sensitive time, as Nusra had massacred 20 Druze civilians in Idlib governorate in northern Syria the day before. In the months prior to the massacre, Nusra fighters had destroyed historic Druze graves and shrines in Idlib and forced hundreds of Druze to covert to Sunni Islam.
The massacre came as the western and Persian Gulf media launched a propaganda campaign to rebrand Nusra and describe it as a moderate group deserving western military support, despite its ties to Al-Qaeda.
Prominent Lebanese Druze politician Walid Jumblatt played his part. Following the massacre, he refused to condemn Nusra as a terrorist group, instead claiming, “The terrorist regime of Bashar obliged the Syrians to join Nusra.”
While Balous and the Men of Dignity refused to join the effort to protect Suwayda, Druze fighters in the NDF, Dara al-Watan, and SSNP helped the Syrian army recapture the Thaaleh airbase.
At the same time, large numbers of Druze youth were joining the Syrian army following a plea from Druze religious leader Hikmat al-Hijri.
Balous took a different stance. In a speech circulated online, he called on Druze youth to refuse conscription into the army, even though President Assad had made commitments that Druze recruits would remain in Suwayda to protect their own communities.
While seeking to undermine the military defense of Suwayda, Balous’ Men of Dignity organized anti-government protests that included the slogan, “The people want the downfall of the governor [of Suwayda],” Atef al-Nadaf.
Syria expert Aymenn al-Tamimi notes that in response, pro-government elements accused Balous and his followers of “orchestrating the demonstrations as part of a prior agreed plan to destroy the regime in Suwayda through collusion with foreign intelligence and Jabhat al-Nusra.”
In September 2015, Balous was assassinated in a bomb attack along with 25 others, including several Men of Dignity leaders in the Zhahr al-Jabal region.
Although it is not known who killed Balous, it is widely suspected the head of Military Intelligence in Suwayda, Colonel Wafiq Nasser, ordered the bombing. Balous had called for the “citizen’s arrest” of Colonel Nasser three months prior.
Rallying behind the flag
The informed source speaking with The Cradle also pointed to the role of Hezb al-Liwa, or the Brigade Party, in the protests that erupted in Suwayda recently. The group was founded in July 2021 and led by journalist Malik Abu Khair.
In an interview with Al-Monitor, Abu Khair said the party receives no foreign funding and that its political vision called for resolving the Syrian crisis in accordance with the US-backed UN Resolution 2254, which calls for a new constitution, elections, and the removal of President Assad from power.
However, according to the informed source, Abu Khair resides in France, and the party is funded by Qatar, France, and Britain:
“Those who called for protests in the squares were the Brigade Party and the Men of Dignity. They are the ones who raise the Druze flags and demand the implementation of UN Resolution 2254, and they offer dollars to those who join the Syrian Brigade Party or work with them.”
A militia affiliated with the Brigade Party, the Counter Terrorism Force (CTF), was also established in Suwayda in 2021.
Nowras Aziz, an independent journalist from Suwayda residing in France, toldAl-Monitor that the CTF militia “was formed of members with criminal records, militia fighters and former security contractors with the military, as well as members of gangs that carry out kidnappings and demand ransom. Those are known locally and deeply hated.”
The Kurdish and Jordanian roles
The Brigade Party and affiliated CTF have received support from the US military and allied Kurdish forces operating out of the Al-Tanf base on the Syria-Jordan-Iraq border.
Journalist Nowras Aziz added that Brigade Party leader Abu Khair “had contacted the [US-led international] coalition forces at Al-Tanf base in the second half of 2020,” explaining his plan to take full control over the eastern villages of Suwayda province and remove “any presence of the Syrian regime or Iran in that area.”
Sources in Suwayda speaking to pro-opposition Syria TVconfirmed the Brigade Party and CTF received funding, arms, and training from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the US military. This included help in establishing bases under SDF supervision in the eastern countryside of Suwayda.
The sources added that the CTF militia received six months of training from US forces stationed at the Al-Tanf base, under the pretext of combating Iranian militias and drug trafficking.
Because the US base at Al-Tanf is located on the Jordanian border – in close proximity to Suwayda – this suggests the US is using Jordan as a staging ground to support Druze separatism in Syria. The US military has already established 16 military bases in the Hashemite Kingdom, and there is talk about establishing a NATO office in the country.
It is widely acknowledged that the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia used Jordan as a staging ground to support the FSA and Nusra during the war to topple the Syrian government starting in 2011.
Additional evidence for a US and Israeli-backed separatist project in Suwayda emerged in July, roughly one month before the recent protests erupted. As Syria TVreported in July 2023:
The “Syrian Brigade Party announced the establishment of service institutions alternative to those affiliated with the Syrian regime, indicating its desire to establish an independent self-administration for the Druze community, similar to the special regions of northeastern Syria, which are predominantly Kurdish.”
Syria TV further noted that the Brigade Party’s separatist project is “met with widespread opposition” in Suwayda, including from political and civic organizations, most of the local armed factions, and prominent religious leaders.
This suggests the current protests organized by the Men of Dignity and Brigade Party are supported only by a minority of Druze in Suwayda.
However, as in 2011, the western media has focused its attention on the few hundred protesters waving colorful flags and chanting slogans against President Assad to suggest the majority of Syrian Druze back regime change.
In light of the recent protests, the source speaking to The Cradle observes that:
“What caught my attention is an important detail: the raising of the Druze flag. During the protests since 2011, the Druze flag has not been raised at all. This flag-raising indicates preliminary steps that may lead to a separatist movement similar to that undertaken by the Kurds.”
Syrian Druze religious leader Sheikh Yusef Jarbou made a reference to the prominence of the Druze flag in the protests during a meeting with Suwayda notables on 30 August, one week after the protests began.
Sheikh Jarbou rejected calls by some of the protestors for separatism and the overthrow of the Syrian government, while stating that the flag of the Syrian state is the flag that he represents, and that siding with Damascus is the “strategic and national choice.”
Additionally, not all protesters in Suwayda are seeking regime change, as media reports typically imply.
Prominent Syria expert Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma explained that “most of the protesters are calling for more government activity in the economic life of the country, rather than a collapse of the government.”
“They want more electricity, they want subsidies, they want better schooling, they want the currency to be stabilized. They are desperate. They want higher salaries,” Landis said.
Crushing Syria through sanctions
It remains to be seen whether US and Israeli efforts to turn the Druze community against the Syrian state will succeed.
As journalist Aaron Mate observed, US planners are waging an economic war against average Syrians, hoping a collapse in living standards will turn them against the government.
Andrew Tabler, a former senior US official for Syria policy, boasted in 2021 that US sanctions have caused Syria’s currency to collapse, leading to “corresponding cuts in regime subsidies that have exacerbated fuel and food shortages for everyday Syrians.”
The threat of economic collapse comes as pro-Israeli voices are calling for the establishment of a “Free Druze Province” in Suwayda, bound by the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to the west, the Al-Tanf base to the east, and US and Israel-allied Jordan to the south.
Damascus-based journalist Vanessa Beeley warns that the stage is now set for a possible US-Israel military intervention.
She reports that according to Syrian security sources, the US is gathering mercenaries at Al-Tanf in preparation to seize Suwayda and the border crossings with Jordan.
If such an intervention takes place, Israel will be one step closer to achieving the goal of dividing Syria into weak, ethnic mini-states, as articulated by Oden Yinon some four decades ago.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
On July 24, it was revealed that Transparency International’s New Zealand wing had enlisted the specialist advice of some of the country’s biggest, most notorious lobbying firms on improving ethical standards in the political and corporate lobbying industry. A local businessman, who’d independently offered to assist TINZ in cleaning up the sector, blew the whistle.
Expressing “astonishment,” they compared TINZ’s consultation of high-ranking lobbyists on how to clean up their own industry as akin to “police recruiting gang members to determine new rules on pursuit of fleeing drivers.” Yet, anyone familiar with Transparency International’s history would hardly be surprised.
Founded by World Bank apparatchiks in 1993, Transparency International (TI) has relentlessly exposed public sector corruption in the Global South while leaving government-enabled criminality in rich nations unexamined. In other words, it is a means of perpetuating privatization overseas for the benefit of Western investors. Accordingly, the organization is financed by a welter of major corporations, including firms implicated in industrial-scale corruption and tax evasion, such as Google, Microsoft, and Siemens.
The mainstream media never subject Transparency International or its dubious annual Global Corruption Barometer and Corruption Perceptions Index to critical scrutiny, invariably giving prominent billing to the organization’s regular publications and pronouncements. Nonetheless, a report on the TINZ controversy by New Zealand public radio contained a remarkable disclosure. The division was noted to receive sizable funding from several local government sources, including Canberra’s equivalents of the CIA and NSA, the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Security Bureau.
TINZ’s CEO defended this sponsorship, arguing spying agencies “have a strong interest in fighting corruption – that is one of their primary issues, the things that they do.” Western intelligence services have indeed been heavily focused on “fighting corruption” in recent years. As we shall see, though, the objective is to weaponize the issue in order to demonize and destabilize “enemy” governments and perhaps even foment regime change. Frequently too, Transparency International has played a starring role in these efforts.
Transparency International’s branding belies its nefarious goals
‘COMPLEX AND CONTROVERSIAL’
In 2013, TI published its first Government Defence Anti-Corruption Index, measuring levels of alleged corruption in the defense sectors and militaries of 82 countries. Many of the governments that ranked poorly criticized the findings, and report methodology, under which 77 “technical questions” were posed to local state officials and representatives of think tanks and universities.
As Mark Pyman, then-head of TI UK’s Defence and Security Programme, explained in response, simply not answering these questions was sufficient to bag a country a negative rating. These queries ranged from frivolous – such as whether a country’s defense chiefs “publicly commit” to fighting corruption – to intensive interrogation of military operations and procurement. It’s quite understandable government officials in, for example, Venezuela – among the Index’s worst performers that year – would be very wary of such approaches.
Those anxieties would no doubt be maximized by TI’s Defence and Security program being at that time funded by NATO and a number of Western governments. Since then, despite not generating much in the way of press coverage, it has become a standalone division of TI, with its own website, issuing a steady stream of reports on corruption issues in the international defense sector.
These publications deploy lofty rhetoric and frequently identify very serious issues and problems. But their recommendations are typically concerned with making the art of invasion and killing more efficient, ensuring that NATO state weaponry, technology and skills can’t be accessed by the “wrong” governments, and encouraging slightly enhanced state oversight of certain areas, such as private military companies. And only then because Western governments might lose money, and risks could be posed to their “foreign policy interests.”
Transparency International’s corruption risk index focuses heavily on mitigating risks to “foreign policy interests”
‘NON-LETHAL ENGAGEMENT’
This background is vital to consider, as TI UK’s Defence and Security Programme has a formal, albeit largely concealed, relationship with 77th Brigade, the British Army’s psychological warfare division. The Winter 2017 edition of Corruption Cable, TI UK’s quarterly newsletter, has a dedicated section on this suspect bond, through which members of the shadowy and highly controversial military unit are regularly seconded to the Programme for a year.
A 77th Brigade secondee was quoted at length praising the Programme, which provides “opportunities [that] extend beyond relating to the Army-related work.” This included producing material for “case studies, reports and teaching packages”:
“All of this will eventually benefit the Army, as I take the knowledge I have gained back with me and the value of being surrounded by knowledgeable and passionate people cannot be underestimated!”
This sounds wholesome enough, although as the secondee openly stated, the 77th Brigade’s core components include the foremost media and psychological operations divisions of British military intelligence. As such, they added, the unit is concerned “with using non-lethal engagement and non-military levers to adapt behaviours of opposing forces and adversaries.”
As was revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic, these “forces and adversaries” include average social media the world over, whose perceptions and behavior the unit seeks to “adapt” through propaganda, manipulation and informational subterfuge. It seems all but inevitable that knowledge 77th Brigade operatives gain while seconded to TI – which may include the answers to Government Defence Anti-Corruption Index questions provided by foreign defense officials – is exploited for psychological warfare purposes.
This analysis is reinforced by a series of leaked documents related to the internal workings of Integrity Initiative, a British intelligence black propaganda unit. Among the papers is a proposal for a government-funded program exposing state corruption in the West Balkans, which names none other than Mark Pyman alongside a British Army Brigadier who founded TI’s Defence and Security division, and two 77th Brigade veterans, including its founder-and-chief Alex Aiken, as potential project staff.
Aiken’s accompanying biography notes that he was personally responsible for “forming the strategic relationship with Transparency International,” a clear indication of how valuable and significant the secondment program was considered at the highest levels of the British Army and 77th Brigade. Integrity Initiative operative Euan Grant was also proposed for the project. Other leaked files indicate he concocted a variety of wide-ranging plans for “information operations,” exposing purported Russian state and corporate corruption.
Source | UK Army
One scheme entailed sourcing damaging intelligence on Russian organized crime activities from major financial institutions, then publicizing the yield via a number of sources, such as journalists at major publications and the producers of the hit TV show McMafia, but “especially” the 77th Brigade. One of Grant’s proposed information sources was HSBC, a major British bank linked to every form of corruption and malfeasance imaginable globally. Coincidentally, his contacts there included former high-ranking MI5 and MI6 officials.
BOYS FROM BRAZIL
One might argue that even if corruption by governments, businesses, organizations, and individuals is exposed via intelligence agency “information operations,” the ends justify the means. After all, corruption is a serious crime for which the perpetrators should always be held accountable to the full extent of the law but rarely ever are.
Yet, the public and media appetite for righteous defenestrations of corrupt officials can easily be exploited for malign ends. This is precisely why Western intelligence agencies have so determinedly sought to foment such an appetite over many years.
In November 2009, the Brazilian Federal Police Agents Association’s fourth congress was convened. Among the speakers was Judge Sergio Moro, a minor celebrity for his recent role in busting a major money laundering operation, who led a panel on “Fighting Corruption and Organized Crime” He argued for changes in the law and more judicial autonomy to facilitate the prosecution of white-collar crime in the country.
Also present was American prosecutor Karine Moreno-Taxman, who was then based in the U.S. Embassy in Brazil. She led a panel advocating for Brazilian authorities to maintain an informal system of collaboration with their American counterparts, circumventing formal cooperation structures as set out in international treaties. Along the way, she stressed the need for manipulating public opinion in prosecutions of high-profile figures to engender loathing of those being investigated:
“Society needs to feel that that person really abused the job and demand that he be convicted. If you can’t bring this person down, don’t do the investigation.”
Five years later, Moro and Moreno-Taxman were key figures in Operation Lava Jato. Publicly presented as a crusading anti-corruption effort heralding a new dawn in Brazil, in which democracy and the rule of law reigned supreme, in reality, it was a fraud directed by the CIA, FBI, and U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ). The objective was to destroy the country’s most profitable companies and prevent the left from retaking power.
For years, Lava Jato prosecutors – all graduates of FBI and DoJ training programs – along with Moro, who oversaw the effort, were hailed by Western journalists and officials. Moro was even named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2016. In December of that year, TI gifted the Lava Jato team its annual “Anti-Corruption Award,” which “honours remarkable individuals and organisations worldwide…who expose and fight corruption.”
Neither “Time” nor TI acknowledged that months earlier, local media revealed Moro illegally wiretapped former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s defense team. This was one of many egregious criminal tactics in which the judge, and Lava Jato prosecutors, routinely engaged. In fact, TI Brazil ignored a great many damaging disclosures about investigators, instead giving the Operation blanket, fawning coverage, and documenting and praising their crusading efforts every step of the way.
Following Moreno-Taxman’s prescription that “society needs to feel that that person really abused the job and demand that he be convicted” to the letter, Lava Jato prosecutors went to enormous lengths to demonize Lula. In regular press conferences, prosecutors presented laughable PowerPoints depicting him at the epicenter of a grand, labyrinthine regional and international corruption conspiracy through which the former President was intimately implicated in every serious crime imaginable.
In July 2017, TI welcomed Lula’s conviction on corruption charges as “a significant sign the rule of law is working in Brazil and that there is no impunity, even for the powerful.” It added that prosecutors and judges involved in the probe were “facing attacks from all sides…proof corruption does not distinguish between ideologies or political parties.”
‘DEMOCRATIC CREDENTIALS’
Yet, Lava Jato did have a heavily partisan bias. Investigations by “The Intercept,” based on the hacked communications of investigators, starkly exposed from June 2019 onwards the Operation’s fraudulent nature and intimate ties to U.S. intelligence. One prosecutor dubbed Lula’s incarceration, which disqualified him from the race and laid the foundations for far-right Jair Bolsonaro’s resultant victory, “a gift from the CIA.”
In response to these bombshell revelations, TI quickly issued a statement claiming to be “closely following the reporting.” Strikingly though, rather than condemning how Lava Jato unlawfully weaponized corruption for malign ends, the organization instead primarily praised the Operation. It had claimed TI “revealed criminal schemes” and “challenged powerful politicians and businesspeople” while “bolstering a positive anti-corruption dynamic in Latin America, which has produced significant results in several countries.”
While TI conceded Lava Jato prosecutors needed to explain “alleged irregularities and violations of the principles of equality of arms and impartiality” revealed by “The Intercept,” it considered “rigorous investigation of the violation of private communications” to be “equally crucial.” A cynic might suggest TI was concerned subsequent disclosures would directly implicate the organization in Lava Jato’s malign machinations, which they did.
Hacked communications show TI Brazil director Bruno Brandão enjoyed a very warm relationship with lead Lava Jato prosecutor Delton Dallagnol, and he was a member of several messaging app groups in which various connivances were formulated and discussed. Furthermore, Brandão personally helped produce a TI Brazil-approved list of candidates in the 2018 election who avowedly shared Lava Jato’s ethos, along with a ranking of politicians according to their legal problems and purported commitments to democracy.
Brandão has since attempted to distance himself from Lava Jato, claiming he and TI had simply made a mistake “in believing that the leaders of Lava Jato had democratic credentials.” Yet, in April 2022, Brazil’s Federal Auditing Court and Public Prosecutors Office sought to open an investigation into TI Brazil for having illegally collaborated with prosecutors. There are suggestions the organization may have stood to benefit financially from that relationship.
Questions can only abound as to whether Brandão – and by extension TI Brazil – was in on the con all along. In 2016, he made dozens of appearances in national and international media, denying that a coup was in swing after Dilma Rousseff was improperly deposed due to bogus corruption allegations. Immediately after she left office, Brasilia started auctioning off its offshore oil reserves to foreign buyers. Two of the largest beneficiaries were Shell and ExxonMobil, both donors to Transparency International.
This was just one of many examples of Lava Jato’s economic destruction. The Operation created a climate in which even vague insinuations of impropriety could damage major companies if not entire industries. It paralyzed construction, while millions of jobs and tax revenues were lost, causing the country’s GDP to contract by at least 3.6%. For the CIA, which wanted to reduce Brazil to its impoverished, authoritarian, and easily exploitable Cold War status, this was precisely the point.
According to a classified diplomatic cable obtained by Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, Libyan Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh met with the head of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, David Barnea, in the Jordanian capital Amman last year to discuss “practical steps to normalize relations” between the two countries.
Specifically, the meeting dealt with “the possibility of Israeli political and military support for Dbeibeh,” who controls Libya’s western regions, in exchange for the North African country joining the Abraham Accords.
The director of Jordanian intelligence, Major General Ahmad Husni, was tasked with ensuring the meeting was held in absolute secrecy. The document also highlights that “this conversation was arranged in cooperation with Jordan and the United Arab Emirates under the supervision of the United States.”
The UAE reportedly participated on the condition that a possible normalization agreement would also include the government of Khalifa Haftar, who controls the country’s eastern regions and is supported by Abu Dhabi.
Monday’s revelations fly in the face of the official position of Dbeibeh’s government following last week’s diplomatic blunder by the Israeli foreign ministry, when they revealed details of a secret meeting between Israel’s top diplomat and sacked Libyan foreign minister Najla Mangoush in Rome.
In the wake of the crisis, Dbeibeh’s office feigned ignorance about the meeting, as did his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu. Nonetheless, after fleeing Libya and being sacked from her job, Mangoush confirmed that her talk with Foreign Minister Eli Cohen was approved by the prime ministers of both nations.
Furthermore, two Libyan officials revealed to AP last week that Dbeibeh met with CIA director William Burns in Tripoli last January to discuss normalizing relations with Israel, following his meeting with the Mossad chief in Jordan.
According to the diplomatic cable obtained by Al-Akhbar, Mangoush, and Dbeibeh are not the only Libyan officials being approached about normalization with Israel, as diplomatic channels reportedly also exist with the speaker of the House of Representatives in the east of the country, Aguila Saleh Issa, who is affiliated with Haftar, and the president of the Libyan Council of State, Khaled al-Mishri, based in the west.
Tel Aviv’s blunder last week caused an uproar in Washington, as the White House chastised senior Israeli officials for the “irresponsible behavior” of foreign minister Cohen, saying it harmed efforts to accelerate normalization between Israel and Arab countries.
Under a 1957 law in Libya, it is illegal to have formal relations with Israel, as former president Muammar al-Gaddafi was a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause. Pro-Palestinian sentiment has remained strong since a NATO-led bombing campaign and insurgency toppled Gaddafi’s government in 2011 and plunged the country into chaos.
In remembrance of the August 28, 1953, coup Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian says coups, sanctions, and soft power are how the West deals with progressive movements around the world.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian says that Western governments are pushing hard to suppress the progression of independent nations.
“Influence, coup d’état, economic sanctions, hard and soft warfare are all tools that arrogant powers (The West) use to suppress the will of independent countries,” Amir-Abdollahian said in a post on X on Saturday.
The post came in remembrance of the 70th anniversary of the 1953 military coup carried out by American and British intelligence apparatuses to topple Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
The top Iranian diplomat pointed to the event as a marker of the behavior of colonial powers who deal with progressive revolutions around the world along the same line, no matter what the politics of those who come to power may be.
بازخوانی کودتای ۲۸ مرداد نشان میدهد که واکنش استعمار قدیم و نوین به گرایشات آزادیخواهانه و استقلالطلبانه ملتها از یک مدل ثابت پیروی میکند و ارتباطی با کیفت دولتهای مستقر ندارد. نفوذ، کودتا، تحریم اقتصادی، جنگ سخت و نرم، ابزار نظام سلطه برای سرکوب اراده کشورهای مستقل است.
— H.Amirabdollahian امیرعبداللهیان (@Amirabdolahian) August 19, 2023
The American CIA and the British MI6 worked toward empowering the monarchial rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1953 after Mossadegh rose to power in Iran.
By issuing a decree to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in which Britain owned the majority shares, Mosaddegh emerged as a significant threat to British and US interests in West Asia.
The then Prime Minister was convicted of treason by a court martial following the August coup and was placed in solitary confinement for three years as he eventually died under house arrest in exile in 1967.
Former foreign secretary David Owen told The Guardian on Tuesday that the time has come for the UK to officially recognize its role in deposing the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.
The US revealed information on its role in the toppling of Mossadegh when it released declassified documents 10 years ago that revealed the UK partook in the operation.
While the US was more concerned with fears that Mossadegh was a socialist, the UK was unsettled by the nationalization of the British oil company in Iran.
The joint US-UK operation was initially codenamed “Operation Boot” but was later renamed “Ajax.”
David Owen, who was British foreign secretary from 1977 to 1979, told The Guardian: “There are good reasons for acknowledging the UK’s role with the US in 1953 in overthrowing democratic developments.”
Shrouded with corruption, Shah’s regime later fell apart in 1979, and the Iranian revolution brought about the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“I made it clear to the Shah that his form of rule had to make way for democratic reforms, but I wish I had known of his serious illness and could have pressed him much earlier in 1978 to stay in Switzerland for medical treatment and let a more democratic government emerge in Iran,” he added.
The Pakistani Army’s persecution of Imran Khan is not only one of the worst ever scandals in Pakistan’s scandal-ridden political history but one of the most shameful in global politics and global sport as well.
Khan was Pakistan’s Prime Minister when the Army, working on the explicit instructions of the CIA, overthrew him in a coup, jailed him on trumped up corruption charges, barred him from any political activity in the near future and replaced him with a group of London-based gangsters, all of whom came from the Shariff wing of the Army-controlled Bhutto/Shariff political divide.
Prior to his rise to political prominence, Khan captained Pakistan to their 1992 World Cricket Cup victory triumph, a feat that helped cement his role as one of cricket’s all time greats, on a par with even Australia’s great Sir Don Bradman, widely acknowledged as history’s greatest ever cricketer.
But whereas Bradman finished his career in 1948 when cricket was dominated largely by the English upper crust and harder-boiled Ossies, Khan came through in the modern era when the Indian sub continent had cricket gods rather than mere stars and few of those gods were bigger or worshipped more reverently than Khan, who quickly became a household name in the English-speaking world.
And quite a playboy as well, as his good looks, Midas-like bank balance and sporting prowess put him on a par with the biggest of Hollywood’s mega- stars. And on top of all that, there was his incredible philanthropy where he paid for two entire hospitals in Pakistan out of his own pocket.
Helped along by of all that, Khan’s party eventually shot to power in August 2018, whereupon Khan began navigating the very dangerous waters of Pakistan’s Army-controlled politics. Khan’s independence was a turn up for the books as Pakistan has traditionally been a playground for British and American deep state shenanigans working through their Bhutto/Shariff puppets, which the Pakistani Army control on their behalf. None of its prime ministers came to power without MI6’s backing (except for Zia who was a Yankee puppet). Whatever about Zia, Khan was nobody’s poodle. He was a Pakistani patriot and a thoroughly good guy through and through.
Which is probably what quickly landed him in the soup after Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian civil war when Khan declared that Pakistan would not only stay neutral but would buy oil from Russia and also strive to maintain friendly relations with Russia, but with India and China as well.
To put this eminently sensible stance in perspective, Pakistan has been tottering on the brink of defaulting on its debt for years now and it simply does not have the money to buy oil, fertiliser, tea and other essentials. In such a scenario, it made eminent sense to cut a deal with Russia and everyone and anyone else who would help keep Pakistan afloat.
Pakistan has less than $4 billion of foreign exchange reserves, but has to pay back $25 billion to the IMF and other Western loan sharks over the next year. Pakistan’s total external debt is a whopping $120 billion. Although China has offered a comparatively modest $2 billion in help, China cannot be Pakistan’s permanent crutch. And Pakistan needs far more than a Chinese crutch to escape the economic abyss devouring it.
Pakistan owes China $27 billion, the IMF, World Bank and ADB consortium a further $45 billion, with tens of billions more owed to Wall Street, London bond holders and NATO’s other extortionists. Given that interest rates and rice prices are all going north, and that Pakistan is another NATO-induced basket case, Pakistan needs smart and patriotic leaders with the moral grit of their former cricket captain, who will bite the bullet and default on these unconscionable NATO loans so that Pakistan might start anew with a clean slate.
The Yanks and their British sidekicks, who are deeply embedded in the Pakistani military, its fearsome secret service in particular, will have none of that or anything remotely resembling it. Despite unprecedented crowds coming out in his support, Khan and thousands of his supporters were jailed and their families were given the kinds of threats that would lead elsewhere to very long custodial sentences.
Not in Pakistan where the thugs of the Pakistani High Command call the shots. This is the same British-trained military, remember, that raped the girls and women of East Pakistan, Bangladesh, from one end of the country to the other, when Bangladesh declared independence in 1971 and that has had a very sinister working relationship with Afghanistan’s Taliban for decades now. Because Pakistan’s top brass are dangerous thugs, their threats, many of which were carried out, have to be taken very seriously indeed.
Although the Pakistani military have repeatedly claimed that they are the upholders of the Pakistani constitution and sovereignty, the truth is that they and their CIA and MI6 playmates have been a cancer at the heart of Pakistani society for decades now.
Khan’s way, to maintain friendly relations with all players and to pull Pakistan out of the mire, was the obvious way to go. But not for the CIA, MI6 or their buddies in Pakistani military intelligence, who are as determined to freeze Khan out as are their American masters to freeze Trump out of their own excuses for elections.
This is at a time, remember, when Sri Lankan test cricketers have been bombed in Pakistan as part of the ISIS/CIA plans to destabilise Pakistan, contain China and, with the help of the sewer rats of the BBC, libel Imran Khan, Taliban Khan, as those toffee nosed dogs call Khan, whose boots those BBC rats are not fit to lick.
Khan, as it happens, is an ethnic Pashtun, the same tribal confederation that fought the BBC’s British rapists in Afghanistan and who do all the heavy work in Pakistan in all kinds of weather. In sniggering that Khan was “bowled out” the BBC, after dutifully repeating all the CIA tropes about both him and Pakistan, snigger that Khan referred to former CIA agent Osama Bin Laden as a “martyr”. But, if one travels to the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, one sees that that is the precise word the Syrians use to describe martyred Turkish soldiers who formerly occupied Sham and whose guts the Syrians traditionally hated for very good reasons. Not only has the word, in other words, a different connotation east of Vienna than the one that fits the BBC/MI6 agenda but the BBC would know that to be the case as they have been interfering in other people’s affairs for well over a century now.
Scoff all they will or be as silently complicit on Pakistan’s tens of thousands of prisoners of conscience as the BBC, Amnesty International, the Nobel Institute and all of the other NATO bought and bribed mouthpieces are but, because of their criminal complicity in Pakistan’s agony, Pakistan, which has seen none worthier than Imran Khan before, will never now see his likes again unless the BBC and all lickspittles like them are booted aside. Fast bowler, effective batter, philanthropist, Prime Minister, a top candidate for the best-looking cricketer of all-time and perhaps the greatest and bravest Pakistani patriot of them all. The hope has to be that, just as his bowling and batting inspired millions of his young compatriots, so also will his living martyrdom inspire tens of millions to rise and put Pakistan’s corrupt military, Pakistan’s corrupt politicians and Pakistan’s corrupt judiciary as well as their British, Australian and American enablers in their place and pull Pakistan’s hundreds of millions out of the NATO inspired penury the great Imran Khan tried to save them from.
This information, said Hersh, came from a US intelligence official, who stated more specifically, that “the word was getting to him [Blinken] through the Agency [CIA] that the Ukrainian offense was not going to work. It was a show by Zelensky and there were some in the administration who believed his bullshit.”
Following in the footsteps of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when he ended the Vietnam War through a peace deal in Paris in 1973, Blinken, according to Hersh’s source, has sought to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace agreement, however, “it was going to be a big lose.”
The Russian Defense Ministry announced earlier that as of August 4, the Ukrainian forces lost more than 43,000 troops and 4,900 units of military equipment.
‘Jeddah peace’; a Blinken story
In his piece, Hersh also cited the US official as saying that the Jeddah Peace Summit, which was scheduled earlier this month, failed after Russia was not invited.
“Jeddah was [Biden National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan’s baby,” Hersh cited the official as saying, reaffirming that Sullivan had “planned it to be Biden’s equivalent” of the World War I peace treaty known as Woodrow Wilson’s Versailles Treaty moment.
“The grand alliance of the free world meeting in a victory celebration after the humiliating defeat of the hated foe to determine the shape of nations for the next generation. Fame and Glory. Promotion and re-election. The jewel in the crown was to be Zelensky’s achievement of Putin’s unconditional surrender after the lightning spring offensive,” the official said before adding that “they were even planning a Nuremberg-type trial at the world court, with Jake as our representative. Just one more f***-up, but who is counting?”
Significantly, the official concluded by stating that in Jeddah, what happened was that “forty nations showed up, all but six looking for free food after the Odessa shutdown.”
Ukraine counteroffensive
Last month, Hersh reported, also citing a US official, that the US and Ukrainian military have refrained from making forecasts about future victories in the counteroffensive because Russia has a clear upper hand on the ground.
“The American and Ukrainian military are no longer making any predictions,” the US official was quoted by Hersh as saying. “The Ukrainian army has not gotten past the first of three Russian defense lines. Every mine the Ukrainians dig up is replenished at night by the Russians.”
The fact of things “is that the balance of power in the war is settled. Putin has what he wants,” the official noted. Ukraine is not in the capacity to retake Crimea, Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk, and Zaporozhye.
The Ukrainian President has “no plan, except to hang on,” he added.
Syrian Army operating in the depth of the Syrian desert delivered another blow to the CIA in the region by eliminating a group of ‘moderate rebels’ that turned out to be from ISIS.
The Syrian Arab Army units combing the Syrian desert for ISIS (ISIL – Daesh) terrorists discovered the movement of an armed group heading to attack a convoy of Syrian tankers carrying oil on the Salamiyah – Raqqa road in the eastern Hama countryside and clashed with the group.
Reports from the region confirm that several of the ISIS terrorists were killed in the clashes and others were injured.
The convoy was saved and the Syrian Arab Army chased the fleeing terrorists into the desert toward their dens in eastern Syria where the US Army erected some of its illegal military bases.
ISIS was a creation of the CIA, one of the US’s assigned agencies to force-export its excess of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedoms’ to countries that never asked for it, and to defend the US’s interests across the globe, these US interests happen to be the interests of the few corporations known as the 1% in the US and their politician executives.
In Syria, and after the failure of the Arab Spring in the Levantine country, the USA and its European lackeys, members of the NATO ‘defensive’ alliance, and its regional stooges created ISIS out of the defeated Al Qaeda Levant and unleashed the new group in both Iraq and Syria arming it with the most advanced weapons which fall into the hands of these terrorists by US military cargo planes ‘accidentally‘ dropping their shipments to them, or by direct deliveries of weapons, munition, military gears, medical and food supplies, to ‘moderate’ al Qaeda groups who would ‘defect’ to the ranks of ISIS, each time.
The Syrian Arab Army and its allied forces are now carrying out a new military operation across the Syrian desert to eradicate the CIA-created and Pentagon-sponsored ISIS terrorists after a series of deadly massacres and terrorist attacks against the Syrian people in and around the Syrian desert.
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Westwards child sex trafficking is a much more serious issue than are the trumped-up charges NATO laid against Russian President Putin.
In examining the issue of child sex trafficking from Ukraine, this article is divided into seven parts. We first place the allegations NATO raised against Russian authorities into our overall analytical framework and then argue that those NATO charges should be dismissed as cheap, albeit predictable propaganda. We next look at overall trends in child sex trafficking not only in Ukraine but globally as well. Finally, we look at the case of sex trafficking Ukrainian children into both Britain and Ireland as important microcosms of overall Ukrainian patterns before making a number of important caveats, conclusions and recommendations for further analysis and action.
Questioning Russians
The CIA and MI6, working through their agents in the International Criminal Court, have charged two Russian citizens, President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, with the apparent war crime of removing thousands of children from the regions of Eastern Ukraine and South-Western Russian where fighting over the region’s future has most intense.
As President Putin is far and away NATO’s primary bête noir, we are best generally ignoring the charges against him for the sake of analysis, as to do otherwise would only further weaponise NATO’s stupidity regarding such matters.
For our purposes, Maria Lvova-Belova is far more important. Lvova-Belova stands accused by NATO’s agents of the mass abduction of as many as 19,544 Ukrainian children, if we accept the figures of MI6 agent Zelensky’s regime.
Lvova-Belova’s ICC arrest warrant says she is accused of bearing “individual criminal responsibility” for the “unlawful deportation and transfer of children” from Ukraine to the Russian Federation.
Although those appear to be serious charges, it must be stressed that neither Lvova-Belova nor Putin, nor anybody else in a position of authority in Russia, denies that large numbers of children were evacuated from areas like Mariupol, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Kharkiv during the course of the conflict and that those children were placed in appropriate holding camps throughout the Russian Federation from Crimea in the west to Siberia in the east.
As seasoned American combat veteran Colonel Douglas Macgregor has stated that he has never seen or experienced battles as intense as those now being waged between Russia and NATO’s Ukrainian proxies, few could reasonably argue that getting women and children out of the line of fire was not the right thing to do.
In an interview she freely gave with NATO’s VICE outlet, Lvova-Belova makes precisely that point, that she was helping get the children out of the line of fire. And she further makes the point that, as she is a mother (married to a Russian Orthodox Church priest, with whom she bore five biological and adopted a further eighteen children, one of whom was a displaced 15-year-old boy from Mariupol), she is simply not hard-wired that way.
Although both VICE and the pro NATO Moscow Times (which the Vatican, incidentally regards as an excellent source on Russia) make a great deal of that, my reading of her action is that both Lvova-Belova and her husband are into helping children and, if the situation was otherwise, if Lvova-Belova had more sinister motives, then both she and Putin would be extremely stupid for making her so vulnerable to such charges.
The fact of the matter is there is a terrible war raging, for reasons that do not currently concern us, around Mariupol, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Kharkiv and Lvova-Belova is to be unequivocally praised for helping to evacuate children from those kill zones.
Although VICE claims that the children evacuated to Russia were beaten for expressing support for MI6 agent Zelensky’s regime that, to me, sounds suspect. Although the children would naturally be homesick, I would doubt that they, Russian speakers in the main, had any hard and fast opinions about MI6 agent Zelensky’s role in their plight and, even if they did, that they would openly and repeatedly express them. As MI6 seems to be able to assassinate Russian civilians almost at will, it seems extremely suspect that they cannot provide more credible reports on those Russian camps housing the displaced children.
If one wants to get to the bottom of this, then professionally querying Lvova-Belova would be most beneficial. Yet, when she recently gave evidence to the U.N, ambassadors from from the United States, Britain, Albania and Malta boycotted the U.N. Security Council meeting, sending low-level diplomats instead. Instead of taking their opportunity to get their top inquisitors to pummel Lvova-Belova, NATO sent only token observers and thereby gave the impression it is the scalps of Putin and Lvova-Belova, rather than the truth, these chancers desire.
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who has a track record of making wild, unfounded and defamatory allegations, told reporters before the session that the United States strongly opposed the briefing and joined with their British toadies in blocking the United Nations from outside broadcast of the meeting. As Thomas-Greenfield said that Lvova-Belova should not be allowed “to have an international podium to spread disinformation and to try to defend her horrible actions that are taking place in Ukraine”, that confirms Thomas-Greenfield does not, in true American diplomatic fashion, seek the truth. She is, like so many former U.S. Ambassadors to the United Nations before her, a thundering disgrace.
Thus, leaving aside that the United States and its toadies have, as with their genocide campaign in Iraq, been the main purveyors of “disinformation” at the United Nations, her actions show that it is the United States and her British toady that are yet again obfuscating the truth. If Lvova-Belova was the wrong-doer, the Anglo-Saxons had a golden opportunity to corner both her and President Putin but they chose not to, thereby implying they know there is neither smoke nor fire in their slurs. Therefore, as regards the Russkiys, case dismissed.
Go West, Young Child
Whatever questions Putin and Lvova-Belova might have to answer, they pale in comparison to what their accusers must account for. Back in 2022, UNICEF reported that the Ukrainian conflict was creating a child refugee almost every second that, as 90% of those refugees were women and children, there was a considerable risk of child trafficking, most particularly at the Polish border and that, echoing Macgregor’s earlier statement, Mariupol was a hell on earth that women and children had to immediately abandon to preserve life and limb.
NATO’s CNN network not only repeats those child trafficking concerns in its report from Moldova but goes on to say that the United States was scathing about Moldova’s own track record on child trafficking even before the Ukrainian war began and that relevant officials had good reason to be dubious of all efforts, perhaps including such as these, to help refugees.
The United Nations Office On Drugs And Crime (UNOCD) now predicts a 5% increase in detected Ukrainian human trafficking victims for 2023 and a staggering 5.6 million Ukrainian asylum applications in Europe. Allied to that, UNHCR and UNICEF are making major contingency plans to try to alleviate child trafficking from Ukraine which, as we previously reported and, as UNHCR’s Gilian Triggs has also affirmed, has a long track record that predates this conflict in such criminality. As the European Commission has also admitted that Ukrainian children fleeing westwards are at grave risk from traffickers, there is, sadly, considerable smoke and fire when we look at the fate of those fleeing Westwards.
Sound of Freedom’s Porta Parties
Having established that the United Nations and similar reputable bodies are concerned about Ukrainian women and children being trafficked into the West’s flesh markets, let’s briefly delve into that market, whilst holding our noses because, even though this gets very sordid very quickly, we must go down into the sewers after them to root them out.
Sound of Freedom is a 2023 movie based on real-life stories where American agents rescue Colombian children being trafficked to the United States. Although the movie has been criticised for being a conspiracy theory (sic), this link suggests darker reasons for that blanket criticism. Simply put, trafficking is a huge and lucrative business, and if Sound of Freedom helps the fight to stop it, NATO should be praising the movie, not criticising it.
As part of MI6’s campaign to destroy the secular Syrian Arab Republic, impoverished Syrian women and children suffered the most horrible of abuses at the hands of Gulf state sex tourists in the refugee camps of Jordan, which has long been a key MI6 and CIA hub.
Back home in Blighty, notorious Saudi extremist Sheikh Muhammed al-Arefe was allowed tour England’s green and pleasant land to tell pubescent British schoolgirls it was their religious duty to do sex jihad in Syria and to declare that jihadists gang raping pre pubescent Syrian girls was a good and holy thing to do. Having met some of their Syrian victims and having been persecuted by MI6 in England for directly opposing Al-Arefe in particular and his Muslim Brotherhood and MI6 cronies in general, I have, as you can imagine, well-formed views on all of this, just as I have on ISIS bride Shamima Begum, who was trafficked to the ISIS Caliphate by MI6 and their Canadian Intelligence sidekicks, who are no doubt also implicated in Dubai’s notorious porta parties.
To start getting up to speed on Dubai’s porta parties, you can watch videos discussing them here. In essence, they involve Middle Easterners contacting Instagram “influencers” to visit Dubai on all expenses trips where, in return for signing non-disclosure agreements and fulfilling their side of the “contract”, they will be paid tens of thousands of dollars for a few days’ work, which might involve getting repeatedly gang raped and having sex with camels or any other exotic animals that tickle their customers’ warped fancy.
Although the various reports make clear that many of these influencers often commit suicide after fulfilling their side of the “deal”, the big demand for “easy money” and the luxury product trinkets such money can buy mean there is no shortage of women, girls or young boys to satiate the needs of those cash rich criminals. Only a fool would believe that Ukrainians are not being groomed for such services.
MI6 Agent Volodymyr Zelensky
Former American Intelligence asset Scott Ritter claims, in this very important video, that Ukrainian President Zelensky is a British MI6 agent and that his handler is MI6 boss Richard Moore, who attended the Vatican meeting Zelensky used to systematically insult Pope Francis and the over one billion members of the Latin Catholic and allied churches. Moore, Ritter alleges, attended that papal meeting and, more importantly, the subsequent meeting with British agent Archbishop Paul Gallagher who, along with Zelensky’s British Praetorian Guard, is discussed at length from 32:17 onwards in Ritter’s video.
The important point being made here is that, as British Intelligence is leading this NATO war against Russia and as British Intelligence are NATO’s masters of the dark arts and, as British Intelligence has a vast network of enablers who could put trafficked Ukrainian women and children to work at porta parties “for King and country”, all of those concerned for the welfare of trafficked Ukrainian women and children should be concerned about the involvement of Moore, Gallagher and other reprobates in this entire saga.
Cesspit Ireland
Because of Ireland’s relatively small size and its government’s eagerness to appease its Anglo Saxon masters, it makes an insightful case study in child trafficking in general and from Ukraine in particular.
Following Russia’s entry into the Ukrainian Civil War, MI5’s Irish assets went into overdrive. As part of that process, unvetted Ukrainians, women and children in the main, were brought here by the plane full and given work visas, free houses, free food, medical services, pocket money and accommodation to such an extent that they live better than do most Irish working class people.
This human tidal wave put a huge strain not only on the Exchequer but also on our hotels, almost all of which have free-loading Ukrainians taking up one or more floors, as well as on TUSLA, our child protection agency which is, at the best of times, not fit for purpose.
Here is a February 2023 report saying that hundreds of undocumented Ukrainian and other child refugees are under the care of Children Minister Roderic O’Gorman, who is infinitely much more controversial than Russia’s Maria Lvova-Belova. Here is a May 2022 government media report, delighted that almost 100 unaccompanied Ukrainian children have been foisted on the remote county of Mayo, to which we shall shortly return.
It is important to note the role hotels play in all of this, as almost all of them have large concentrations of Ukrainians and other fake refugee free loaders and transient foreign prostitutes staying in them. Because there are, in other words, groups of unvetted people on the margins of society and the law staying in those hotels, it is reasonable to assume that the criminally minded and organised amongst them might very well be involved in child trafficking.
Although Ireland’s police force has been very quiet on this, that silence would be due to censorship by their political overlords, who would consider any raids on Ireland’s porta parties to be showing support for Putin and Lvova-Belova rather than the victims of their own inhumanity.
Take Me Home to Mayo
Because we all have to emulate Zelensky and play for Team MI6, we cannot expect the mainstream media or mainstream politicians to raise these matters and nor, given the constraints of time, can we ourselves be expected to raid the hotels where these abuses are being perpetrated. That being so, we turn to this May 2022 blog post, which comments on the Candle of Grace NGO flying hundreds of undocumented Ukrainians, 59 children in their midst, to the wilds of Mayo with the collusion of controversial Child Minister Roderic O’Gorman.
The author first discusses Candle of Grace and then questions why it bypassed the normal channels, why convicted Belarusian criminal Prof. Yury Bandazhevsky is involved in this caper, why he is living in Mayo rather than in a more appropriate urban setting to pursue his supposed academic interests in radiation sickness and the similarities this entire caper has with the case of Hillary Clinton confidante Laura Sislby who was caught red-handed at the Haitian border smuggling a cash crop of 33 children out of Haiti.
The article suggests that Candle of Grace’s logos, as seen on its Facebook page, are Satanic, an interesting point as Ritter makes the same allegation at 34:30 in this video regarding the present MI6 agent Zelensky lumbered Pope Francis with. Although the article raises important alarms regarding the possible trafficking to Mayo (and elsewhere?) of those children, Candle of Grace raises other alarms analogous to those al-Arefe and the Muslim Brotherhood previously raised regarding MI6’s war on Syria.
This article has argued that, based on its unenviable track record and the evidence of reputable international bodies, Westwards child sex trafficking is a much more serious issue than are the trumped-up charges NATO laid against Russian President Putin and Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, whom the Anglo-Saxons and their Albanian and Maltese lackeys had neither the courage nor the common sense to question.
The article maintains that the opaque world in which Ukrainian-aligned NGOs and the governments, intelligence agencies and British Church figures aligned to them operate facilitate, perhaps even by design, the procurement of trafficked Ukrainian women and children into the white slave trade, Dubai’s notorious porta parties included.
Although much of this article, like all policy-making suggestions, must be cautiously speculative, we believe that the rights of Ukraine’s most at-risk women and children can only be advanced by, on the one hand, countries like China, Belarus and Russia raising their cause in the appropriate international fora and, on the other, by groups like the Irish academics cited above raising their concerns and suspicions to the relevant police authorities and for those police forces to be made take the appropriate actions against any NGOs, clerics or politicians, no matter how well-connected they may be, so that they may pay in full for these most egregious of all crimes against all trafficked women and children, especially, in this case, those from MI6 agent Zelensky’s Ukraine.
The Taliban has not once, but twice eradicated Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation, the world’s largest source of heroin. Despite western accusations, it has never been The Taliban behind the Afghan drug industry, but only ever the US and its allies, with billions in profits breezily laundered through the global financial system.
In the aftermath of the chaotic US and UK withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir warned in the Washington Post of the dangers of “ignoring one important consequence of the Taliban takeover: the coming boom in Afghanistan’s narcotics trade.”
Mir then boldly predicted that, “in the next few years, a flood of drugs from Afghanistan may become a bigger threat than terrorism.”
This projection of an international drug trade boom seemed plausible, considering the longstanding accusations that the Taliban funded their two-decade insurgency against the occupying forces by controlling opium production. In fact, it was believed that 95 percent of heroin used in Britain originated from Afghan opium.
It comes as a surprise then, that a June 2023 report published by Alcis, a British-based geographic information services firm, revealed that the Taliban government had all but eliminated opium cultivation in the country, wiping out the base ingredient needed to produce heroin. This outcome mirrored a similar move by the Taliban in 2000 when they were in power for the first time.
Ironically, instead of praising Kabul’s new leaders for quashing the source of illicit drugs, the international community responded to this development with criticism. Even the US Institute for Peace (USIP), which is funded by the US government, argued that “The Taliban’s successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world.”
Such western displeasure towards the Taliban’s efforts to dismantle the global heroin trade may seem perplexing at first glance.
However, a closer examination of events in Afghanistan reveals a different perspective. Under the guise of the “War on Terror,” the 2001 US and UK invasion was driven in part by the desire to restore the heroin trade, which the Taliban had abruptly terminated just a year earlier.
The western powers sought to reestablish the lucrative flow of billions of dollars that the heroin trade provided to their financial systems. In fact, “For 20 years, America essentially ran a narco-state in Afghanistan.”
‘Dollar for Dollar’
To understand the origins of the Afghan heroin trade, a review of US involvement in the central Asian nation is necessary, beginning in 1979 when the CIA embarked on a covert program to undermine the pro-Soviet Afghan government in Kabul.
The US covertly supported an umbrella of Muslim guerrilla fighters known as mujahideen, with the hope that provoking an insurgency would entice the Soviet Army to intervene. This calculated move would force the Soviets into occupying Afghanistan and engaging in a protracted and costly counter-insurgency campaign, thereby weakening the Soviet Union over time.
To accomplish this, the CIA turned to its close allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for help. Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan facilitated a meeting between CIA Director William Casey and Saudi King Fahd, in which the Saudis committed to matching “America dollar for dollar supporting the mujahedeen.”
The US and Saudi Arabia, with help from Pakistani’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), set up training camps for the mujahideen in Pakistan, and supplied them with advisors, weapons, and cash to fight the Soviets.
Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the founder of the Hizb-i-Islami militia, was among the most prominent mujahideen leaders, receiving some $600 million in aid from the CIA and its allies.
Journalist Steve Coll writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars that Hekymatyar recruited from the most radical, anti-western, transnational Islamist networks to fight with him, including Osama bin Laden and other Arab volunteers. CIA officers “embraced Hekmatyar as their most dependable and effective ally,” and “the most efficient at killing Soviets.”
Caravans of opium
Aid to Hekymatyar and other mujahideen leaders was not limited to cash and weapons. According to renowned historian Alfred McCoy:
“1979 and 1980, just as the CIA effort was beginning to ramp up, a network of heroin laboratories opened along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. That region soon became the world’s largest heroin producer.”
The process involved smuggling raw opium gum to Pakistan, where it was processed into heroin in laboratories run by the ISI. The finished product was then discreetly transported via Pakistani airports, ports, or overland routes.
By 1984, Afghan heroin supplied a staggering 60 percent of the US market and 80 percent of the European market, while devastatingly creating 1.3 million heroin addicts in Pakistan, a country previously untouched by the highly-addictive drug.
McCoy states further that, “caravans carrying CIA arms into that region for the resistance often returned to Pakistan loaded down with opium.” Reports from 2001 cited by the New York Times confirmed that this occurred “with the assent of Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance.”
In May 1990, the Washington Post reported that the US government had for several years received, but declined to investigate, reports of heroin trafficking by its allies, including “firsthand accounts of heroin smuggling by commanders under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.”
Rise of the Taliban
When the Soviets did finally withdraw in 1989, the country fell into civil war as the major CIA-backed factions began fighting among themselves for control of the country. Mujahideen leaders became warlords and committed terrible atrocities against the local population while fighting amongst themselves.
It was during this anarchy that religious students from the madrassas (seminary schools), the Taliban, emerged with the help of Pakistani intelligence to take control of the country in 1996, subsequently inheriting the opium trade, which continued unhindered for several years.
In July 2000, however, Taliban leader Mullah Omar ordered a ban on all opium cultivation. Remarkably, the Taliban successfully slashed the opium harvest by 94 percent, reducing yearly production to only 185 metric tons.
Five months later, in December 2000, the US and Russia used the UN Security Council to impose harsh new sanctions on Afghanistan, citing the Taliban’s refusal to hand over Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, in which 17 US sailors were killed. Bin Laden had taken refuge in the Islamic Emirate in 1996 after he was expelled from Sudan.
The New York Timesreported that US officials sought to impose the new sanctions, despite warnings from the UN that “a million Afghans could face starvation in coming months because of a drought and continued civil war.”
Following the attacks on 11 September, 2001, Bush administration officials demanded the Taliban hand over Bin Laden once again. Mullah Omar insisted the US first provide evidence of Bin Laden’s guilt, but President Bush refused this request and ordered the US air force to begin bombing Afghanistan on 7 October.
In the wake of the bombing, Mullah Omar dropped the demand for evidence, and offered to hand over Bin Laden to US ally Pakistan for trial. Bush administration officials once again refused.
Journalist and author Scott Horton highlights in his bookFool’s Errand a peculiar aspect of the US campaign: the lack of a clear focus on capturing or eliminating Bin Laden. In fact, President Bush had already stated on 25 September that success or failure should not be defined solely by capturing Bin Laden.
Horton notes further that US planners made no initial effort to hunt down Bin Laden and the foreign Arab fighters supporting him. Instead, head of US Central Command, General Tommy Franks prioritized partnering with Afghan warlord Rashid Dostum to take control of the north of the country, and establish a “land link” to Uzbekistan.
Turning to the warlords
To also capture the capital, Kabul, and other key cities in the south, Alfred McCoy notes the CIA:
“Turned to a group of rising Pashtun warlords along the Pakistan border who had been active as drug smugglers in the south-eastern part of the country. As a result, when the Taliban collapsed, the groundwork had already been laid for the resumption of opium cultivation and the drug trade on a major scale.”
Though US forces were too late to prevent Bin Laden’s escape to Pakistan, the US bombing campaign came just in time for the beginning of poppy planting season. Poppies are planted in the autumn so that the juice from the plant, from which opium is extracted, can be harvested in spring.
McCoy clarified further that, “the Agency (CIA) and its local allies created ideal conditions for reversing the Taliban’s opium ban and reviving the drug traffic. Only weeks after the collapse of the Taliban, officials were reporting an outburst of poppy planting in the heroin-heartlands of Helmand and Nangarhar.”
In December, one of these rising Pashtun warlords, Hamid Karzai, was appointed Chairman of the Afghan Interim Administration and later president.
By the spring of 2002, large amounts of Afghan heroin were once again being transported to Britain via daily flights from Pakistani airports. The Guardianobserved the case of a 13-year-old girl who was stopped after she stepped off a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Islamabad to London carrying 13kgs of heroin with a street value of £910,000.
Industrial scale
Thanks to the “land link” established by General Franks, heroin also immediately began flowing north from Mazar-e-Sharif, under CIA ally Rashid Dostum’s control, to Uzbekistan and then to to Russia and Europe.
The flow of heroin was witnessed by Craig Murray, the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who explained that Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, facilitated the smuggling of heroin from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, where it was then shipped up the railway line, in bales of cotton, to Moscow and then Riga. As Murray noted:
“Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker…The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government – the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.”
‘A hands off approach’
In addition to Dostum, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, quickly secured a prominent role in the Afghan heroin trade.
Credible reports emerged that Wali Karzai was deeply involved in the heroin trade, however, according to the New York Times, the incidents were never investigated, “even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.”
Senior officials at the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) complained that the Bush “White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter.”
The Times later reported that according to a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official, a major source of Wali Karzai’s influence was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium-growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar. This allowed Karzai to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges.
Like Dostum and Hekmaytar, Wali Karzai built his heroin empire while on the CIA payroll. The agency began paying Karzai in 2001 to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operated at the agency’s direction in and around Kandahar and to rent a large compound for use as the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. The CIA also appreciated Karzai’s help in communicating and sometimes meeting with Afghans loyal to the Taliban.
Karzai also served as the head of Kandahar’s elected provincial council. According to a senior US military officer in Kabul quoted by the Times, “Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it.”
The blame game
In late 2004, as reports of Karzai’s involvement in the heroin trade were emerging, Alfred McCoy writes that “the White House was suddenly confronted with troubling CIA intelligence suggesting that the escalating drug trade was fueling a revival of the Taliban.”
A proposal from Secretary of State Colin Powell to fight the heroin trade was resisted by US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, and then-Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani. As a compromise, the Bush administration used private contractors for poppy eradication, an effort that New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall later described as “something of a joke.”
Additionally, reports of a 2005 cable sent by the US embassy in Kabul to Powell’s successor, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, viewed Britain as being “substantially responsible” for the failure to eradicate poppy cultivation. British personnel chose where the eradication teams worked, but those areas were often not the main growing areas, and “the British had been unwilling to revise targets.”
The cable also faulted President Karzai, who “has been unwilling to assert strong leadership.” The State Department nevertheless defended him, saying, “President Karzai is a strong partner, and we have confidence in him,” despite reports of his brother’s key role in the heroin trade.
But the problem went beyond Wali Karzai. A UN report for the World Bank published in February 2006 concluded the Afghan heroin trade was operating with the assistance of many top Afghan government officials and under the protection of the Afghan Ministry of Interior.
As evidence of CIA and Afghan government involvement in the heroin trade grew, the focus of the western media shifted towards blaming the Taliban for using drug profits to fund their insurgency against foreign forces.
However, historian Peter Dale Scott challenged this narrative, citing UN estimates that the Taliban’s share of the Afghan opium economy was a fraction compared to that of supporters of the Karzai government. Scott emphasized that the largest share of the drug trade was controlled by those aligned with the Afghan government.
The surge
In early 2010, the Obama administration announced a “surge” of 33,000 US troops to help pacify the country, with a particular focus on key districts known for poppy cultivation. One such district was Marja in Helmand province, which McCoy referred to as “the world’s heroin capital.”
Despite the surge’s mission, US commanders seemed unaware of Marja’s significance as a hub for heroin production, fueled by the surrounding opium fields that accounted for 40 percent of the world’s illicit opium supply.
In September 2010, eight months after the start of the surge, “unsubstantiated” reports emerged that British soldiers were involved in trafficking heroin out of Afghanistan using military aircraft at airports in Camp Bastion and Kandahar.
Camp Bastion, jointly operated by the UK and the US, was located near Lashkar Gah, another major center of poppy cultivation. In 2012, it was alleged that poppy cultivation was taking place just outside the base’s perimeter, with British soldiers providing protection to farmers against Afghan security forces.
By late 2014, British and US forces withdrew from Camp Bastion, handing it over to Afghan forces, who renamed it Camp Shorabak. However, according to a UN report, “the opium-growing area around Britain’s main base in Afghanistan nearly quadrupled between 2011 and 2013.”
Despite the withdrawal, opium exports from Camp Shorabak apparently continued, and a small number of British military personnel returned in 2015 in what was described by the Ministry of Defense as an advisory role.
In 2016, Obaidullah Barakzai, a member of the National Assembly of Afghanistan, claimed, “It’s impossible for a few local drug smugglers to transfer opium in thousands of kilos. This is the work of the Americans and British. They transport it by air from Camp Shorabak.”
After US forces chaotically withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban once again succeeded in eliminating poppy cultivation, showing it was far from a “dedicated drug cartel” after all.
Follow the money
In November 2021, an opium merchant claimed that “All the profits go to the foreign countries. Afghans are just supplying the labor.”
Peter Dale Scott noted that according to the UN, some $352 billion in drug profits had been absorbed into the western financial system, including through the US’ largest banks in 2009. As a result, Scott said the “United States involvement in the international drug traffic links the CIA, major financial interests, and criminal interests in this country and abroad.”
In 2012, the Daily Mail reported that HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, faced up to £640million in penalties for allowing “rogue states and drugs cartels to launder billions of pounds through its branches,” and for becoming “a conduit for criminal enterprises.”
The billions in profits flowing from the Afghan heroin trade into western banks have now been eliminated by the Taliban not once, but twice in the past two decades.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s pronouncement in July 2000 that poppy cultivation was “un-Islamic” was, therefore, a more likely cause of the US sanctions imposed in December of the same year, and of the US invasion of Afghanistan a year later, than was any US desire to apprehend Bin Laden and dismantle Al-Qaeda.
In March 2002, just six months after the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, a journalist asked President Bush, “Where’s Osama bin Laden?” Bush replied, ‘I don’t know. I don’t really think about him very much. I’m not that concerned.”
The Afghan drug trade serves as a stark reminder of the intricate connections between geopolitics, illicit economies, and global finance, and the need for greater transparency and accountability in addressing these complex issues.
The historical evidence also challenges the simplistic narrative that the Taliban largely controlled the Afghan drug trade, highlighting the dominant role played by the US-backed Afghan government and its allies in the CIA.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
The glee that greeted the news that Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian oligarch and the titular head of the Wagner Group, had gone rogue might have been unseemly if the American political establishment were capable of shame. It isn’t. That alleged adults would hope for the dissolution of Russia, and the catastrophic social consequences that would follow, requires an ignorance of history that would be heroic if it were consciously chosen. The truism that people don’t know what they don’t know has particular relevance for the US in the current political moment.
The details of the story are reasonably well known by now and won’t be restated here except where relevant. Missing from Western press accounts since Russia launched its SMO (Special Military Operation) is the actual history that led to the conflict. On his way to Rostov-on-Don Prigozhin stepped into this absence with a series of anti-historical claims regarding the start of the war, all while asserting his allegiance to Vladimir Putin. Knowing nothing about the war outside of the talking points handed it by the Biden administration, the American press had a collective wargasm at the sight of a Russian channeling CIA talking points.
As fresh as current events may ‘feel,’ the US has been interfering in the internal affairs of Russia for well over a century. Racist crank and Progressive fascist Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information to sell WWI to the American people. As the war was winding down, Wilson deployed the American Expeditionary Force to Russia to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution. Ironically (not), the Brits and French also sent Expeditionary Forces toward this same end. The point: most of the anti-Russian West currently supporting the NATO proxy war in Ukraine has been at it since the early twentieth century.
Graph: in this simplified hypothetical based on current differences between US and Russian military spending, the ratio of US to Russian spending in Year 1 is 10:1, while the dollar amount of the difference is $90 ($100 – $10) . By Year 10, the ratio remains the same (10:1), while the cumulative dollar difference has risen to $900. The US spent $1,000 on its military while the Russians spent $100. Applying market logic (value = expenditure), the US has produced ten times as much ordinance and materiel as the Russian have. And yet Russia is a military threat? Source: Urie.
The political posturing around Prigozhin’s tour of Rostov-on-Don has largely been a restatement of the national-security-state-informed views of the regular consumers of American state propaganda. As evidenced by Prigozhin’s now well-censored statements on the internet, he spouted Biden administration talking points regarding the causes of the war (‘unprovoked’), interspersed with claims that the Russian military leadership is more interested in earning medals than with winning wars.
“Just before World War I ended, in 1918, an American force of seven thousand landed at Vladivostok as part of an Allied intervention in Russia and remained until early 1920. Five thousand more troops were landed at Archangel, another Russian port, also as part of an Allied expeditionary force, and stayed for almost a year. The State Department told Congress: “All these operations were to offset effects of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.”” Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
The video of Prigozhin contradicting the historical events that Russian President Vladimir Putin cited as the proximate cause for Russia’s SMO (Special Military Operation) appears to have been disappeared from the internet. In opposition to OSCE maps of Ukrainian forces amassed at the border of Donbas in January 2022 as they shelled ethnic Russian Ukrainians, Prigozhin instead stated that Mr. Putin, whose claims were supported by the maps, was lying. To be clear, the OSCE is an EU institution with no ties to the Russian state.
News that ‘US spy agencies’ had briefed Congress on Prigozhin’s plans well before he stumbled back into Russia indicates foreknowledge. With US President Joe Biden stating that the US played no role in the rebellion, his audience has been reduced to the rapidly shrinking number of citizens of the world who find his views interesting, plausible, or relevant. Recent (alleged) leaks of Pentagon, DoD, and intelligence agency documents by Jack Teixeira put a lie to the Biden administration’s happy talk regarding Ukrainian military prowess.
Teixeira’s leaks revealed a much grimmer view of the war up to the present, as well as raising substantive questions regarding Ukraine’s prospects for the Spring / Summer ‘surge.’ In fact, the surge was halted immediately prior to Prigozhin’s holiday in Russia. Whether this represents abject failure on the part of the Ukrainians, the pause that refreshes, or anticipation of Prigozhin’s rebellion, has not been disclosed.
Described as an attempted ‘coup’ in the American press, Prigozhin subsequently claimed that that wasn’t the motive for his actions. Whether this is true, or he got cold feet when the leading institutions of the Russian state rallied around Vladimir Putin, is a question for the history books. That US intelligence agencies had foreknowledge of Prigozhin’s actions gives them a ‘Maidan’ feel. That most Americans have no knowledge that the US ousted the duly elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in a US-led coup in 2013 – 2014, helps explain American support for the war.
Retired US Colonel Douglas MacGregor, a frequent and insightful commentator on events in Ukraine, is convinced that Prigozhin’s motives had little to do with a coup attempt. MacGregor’s theory is that the Russian military leadership, including Prigozhin, is frustrated with the slow pace of the war, particularly following the apparent implosion of the Ukrainian ‘surge.’ However, foreknowledge by US intelligence agencies, combined with the specifics of Prigozhin’s rant regarding the American starting point for the war, suggests that there is more to the story.
Prigozhin challenged the history of the war in terms that came straight from CIA talking points. The Russian explanation since the winter of 2021 has been 1) the war started with the American-led coup in Ukraine in 2013 – 2014, that in turn led to 2) and eight-year civil war in Ukraine in which 3) tens of thousands of ethnic Russian Ukrainians were slaughtered by the Banderite right (a.k.a. Nazis) supported by the US. Using maps from the OSCE, the Russians concluded that the Ukrainians were about to launch a major offensive against ethnic Russian Ukrainians in Donbass.
The Americans have maintained that the Russian offensive in Ukraine was ‘unprovoked,’ as in bearing no relation to the 2013 – 2014 US led coup there, the subsequent civil war, or the three-plus decades of the US moving NATO troops and weapons up to Russia’s border against repeated requests from the Russians not to do so. This Western anti-history is what Yevgeny Prigozhin was shouting when he announced his move of Wagner Group troops into Russia. Facts that were widely considered true before the SMO was launched are now verboten in the US.
Colonel MacGregor’s view that Prigozhin is frustrated with the restrained pace of the Russian military offensive in Ukraine doesn’t seem a complete explanation of recent events. Firstly, most Americans have no idea that the Russian pace has been restrained. To the extent there has been opposition to the war inside Russia, a substantial portion of it comes from the fact that the Ukrainian military and political leadership still exist in any incarnate form. ‘Shock and awe’ are how the Americans destroy a nation.
Unless Prigozhin is claiming that the OSCE is serving Russia’s war propaganda interests with its maps— a low probability endeavor, then he was giving a pledge of allegiance to the US / NATO / Ukraine war effort with his shouted announcement of the Wagner Group’s move into Russia. This would help explain the foreknowledge of his actions by Western intelligence agencies. It also contradicts US President Joe Biden’s wide-eyed insistence that the US was not in league with Prigozhin.
However, the Russians aren’t the intended audience for Biden’s rambling incoherence. ‘The world,’ meaning the governments that in theory represent the interests of 80% of the world’s population, supported Russia when Prigozhin went on summer holiday, and they still do today. This puts the incoherence of the American liberal conceit that they (liberals) represent the interests of the world’s downtrodden into perspective. The Global South supports Russia, not the US. Why would this be the case if Americans are regarded as liberators abroad?
Parallels between Joe Biden and Woodrow Wilson are mounting. Both are / were liberal technocrats who institutionalized racist and fascist / repressive policies while proclaiming themselves to be the saviors of humanity through ill-advised wars. WWI lit the world on fire. Colonel MacGregor argues, with some justification, that there wouldn’t have been a Bolshevik Revolution without massive Russian losses in WWI. Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’ brings some of these tensions to light.
“Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.” George Orwell, 1984
So again, concern inside Russia over the slow pace of the war contradicts everything that Americans have been told about it. While recent leaks of DoD and intelligence agency documents suggest that the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian conscripts have been lost to date, CNN and the New York Times have gone full-Orwell. American development economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was invited by the State Department to visit Ukraine during the Maidan ‘uprising,’ explains why and how it was a US sponsored coup here.
More to the point, a large contingent of American liberals have argued for eighteen months that the war in Ukraine should continue until Ukraine is victorious. This argument means one thing if the Ukrainians are winning the war, and quite another if they aren’t. The (alleged) Teixeira leaks reveal 1) that what American officials have been saying publicly about the progress of the war is contradicted by what they say about it in private, and 2) that the official assessment has it that things are going quite poorly for Ukraine.
This puts American supporters of the war in the position of volunteering Ukrainians to die for a war that they (the Americans) don’t understand. And yet there is no accountability. The proverbial ‘you’ had your facts wrong and large numbers of Ukrainian conscripts died as a result. But this is America. ‘You’ get promoted for having your facts wrong. A lot of people died as a result. However, as word from the Global South has it, the Lilliputians are rebelling.
An institutional problem in the US is that the domestic forces that instigated and continue to support the war risk losing power if the public turns against it. With Joe Biden representing the interests of the MIC (Military-Industrial Complex), Wall Street, the technology industry, and US-based oil and gas industry, the fear is that fake anti-war Republicans can pull a Nixon and shift the war, and with it, donor support, from Democrat to Republican hands. Unfortunately for both the self-styled heroes and villains in this scenario, Ukraine is losing the war.
What should put the fear of Buddha, Yahweh, God, into actual Americans, as opposed to the American political class, is the sanguine discourse being used to assert that nuclear wars are winnable. Go back and read the logic of American nuclear arms production from the 1950s – 1970s and you find talk of nuclear weapons being ‘cheap’ to produce relative to the cost of conventional military ordnance. That low stocks of non-nuclear ordnance could create a choice between surrendering or using nuclear weapons when adverse conditions arise suggests that, with NATO stocks running low, the adult children in the Biden administration could roll-the-dice by using nukes.
Moreover, with the MIC running US foreign policy, the temptation to use the war to sell newer ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons to an international clientele by demonstrating them on the battlefield is likely strong. The same Alfred E. Neumanesque mindset that claimed that Americans would be greeted as liberators when they invaded Iraq in 2003 imagines that the Russians aren’t serious about their nuclear red lines. The fake history of the Cuban Missile Crisis that Americans have been fed represents the MIC standard. By 1962 the Americans had installed first-strike nuclear weapons within miles of Russia (USSR) as they pretended to be shocked that the Soviets would do the same.
Likewise, much of the violence attributed to the Bolsheviks following the Bolshevik Revolution was spillover from WWI sweeping Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. WWI lasted from 1914 – 1918, while the Bolshevik Revolution took place in 1917, but wasn’t settled until 1922, when the (Soviet) Civil War ended. Again, the Americans, Brits, and French sent standing armies to reverse the Bolshevik victory in order to install a liberal, Western-friendly, government that would guarantee the property of Western investors in the USSR following the Revolution.
The Americans lost 117,000 troops in WWI while the Russians lost five and one-half million. The extreme brutality of WWII was a product of residual animosities from WWI. The Holocaust, for which German Nazis were blamed, was replicated across Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. To be clear, these other Holocausts were contemporaneous with the Nazi Holocaust, not inspired by it. While pogroms inspired by European anti-Semitism existed prior to the rise of the Nazis, conflation of Bolshevism with Judaism tied WWII to capitalist imperialism.
“Thousands of Nazis—from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich—came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. They had little trouble getting in. With scant scrutiny, many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees,” their pasts easily disguised and their war crimes soon forgotten. But some had help and protection: from the United States government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories.” Eric Lichtblau, The New York Times.
Forgotten today is that many Westerners at the time, particularly amongst the elites, were virulently anti-Semitic. Former New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau, the author of The Nazis Next Door, details the casual anti-Semitism that informed US General George Patton’s worldview here. In contemporaneous political and public policy circles inside the US, the Nazis were viewed more as anti-communist fellow-travelers than the genocidal maniacs they are viewed as today. Once selective history is set to the side, fellow-travelers seems the more plausible interpretation.
The neo-Realist ‘Great Powers’ nonsense that is popular again since the launch of the Russian SMO is a ‘political’ exposition of ideas and events that found their basis in imperial economic competition. Consider: Joe Biden’s explanation of the US interest in Ukraine is first and foremost economic— to prevent Russia from controlling Europe through European dependence on Russian oil and gas. To be clear, Biden has no problem with the idea of economic dependence. His problem is with a Russian role in it.
Consider: economic dependence is an unexplained phenomenon in capitalist economics because it implies coercive power. Before the launch of Russia’s SMO, Russia was selling its oil and gas to Europe at a subsidized price, making it more attractive to European industry, while consigning said industries to the vagaries of Russian national interests. Paying a market price for oil and gas would raise costs for European industry, either crimping profits or making European products more expensive on world markets (also crimping profits). This gave the Russian state coercive power over European states through ‘their’ industries.
Recent US Presidents understood this, hence the unity of Donald Trump and Joe Biden acting to prevent the Russians from supplying Europe with Russian oil and gas. But what happened to the ‘freedom’ to purchase goods and services, including Russian oil and gas, from whomever one cares to? In American liberal logic, Ukraine has the ‘right’ to associate with NATO if it cares to, just like the Germans and French have (had) the ‘right’ to buy discounted oil and gas from Russia. The ‘fascist’ response was to blow up the pipeline— a.k.a. Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II.
While this isn’t the place for a full-blown exposition of the hypocrisies and paradoxes of capitalism, what the US is doing abroad isn’t capitalism as it is explained by its theoreticians. But it is capitalism as explained by Marxists. Capitalist imperialism is a corporate-state amalgam that exists to send state resources abroad for the benefit of nominally capitalist enterprises at home. An alternative name for this capitalist imperialism is fascism. The political-theoretical difference between state-capitalism and fascism lies in who it is that controls the state.
This Marxist view of capitalism placed the Germans as imperial competitors of the US in both World Wars. This is quite different from the current moral view of the Nazis as reprehensible human beings. From Eric Lichtblau’s reporting (above), moral clarity regarding the Nazis emerged for the Americans in proportion to the number of anti-Semitic Americans from the WWII era who have died off. That Joe Biden represents the moral vanguard of the American liberal class would be ironic if it weren’t so pathetic.
With the most expensive military in the world by a factor of ten, one might imagine that the US would be well-supplied with armaments. According to Colonel MacGregor, this isn’t the case. MacGregor laid out some fair portion of the path from an insufficient supply of conventional weapons to the use of nuclear weapons by the Americans. The obvious question of where the world’s most expensive military is spending its money seems relevant here. While speculation can go far in developing an explanation, the threat of nuclear annihilation is the more pressing result.
With the Americans having refused to implement multiple peace agreements that have been signed between the Ukrainians and the Russians, the NATO proxy war in Ukraine is now an American war. And while the American liberals who support the war deserve whatever consequences might come their way, the rest of the world doesn’t. End the war now.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.
Every July of every year observes the death of one of the most renowned Muslim leaders of our recent history Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.
Sayyed Fadlallah was one of a kind as a pioneer in many different fields. Volumes could be authored to cover part of his endeavors and faithful efforts.
Being one of those who were close to him for a quite long time, I want to mention few very important things about him in this article.
In the field of Islamic unity, Sayyed Fadlallah was one of the strongest leaders and workers to bring Muslims close to each other till they reach unity. He worked hard for it and paid heavy price because this does not fit certain agendas, especially in the west, namely the United States and “Israel”. An attempt against his life was carried out when many western security apparatuses, atop of them the CIA, along with Arab finance and coordination tried to assassinate him by a booby trapped car in the southern suburb of Beirut back in 1985. Thanks to Allah, he narrowly escaped the assassination because he stopped to answer a woman’s question on his way back home.
In another equally important issue, Sayyed Fadlallah believed strongly in dialogue among all to reach mutual understandings and agreements. He was among the first who called for and practiced dialogue with all parties and groups in Lebanon and abroad. His flexibility, openness and broad mindedness gained him a lot of supporters and followers in many regions in the Arab and Islamic world, especially among the new generations.
It is worth mentioning that his openness and flexibility gave him a prominent position in what we can call a new approach in understanding and analyzing Islamic jurisprudence [Fiqh], thus producing the Fatwa. He was very innovative in this regard which caused a stir among the traditional and classical religious circle, but this has been surmounted due to the flexibility of the Fiqh schools in Shia Islam.
We can easily say that he has established a school of thought that would spread in many areas and found itself a place under the sun.
Sayyed Fadlallah’s role in supporting the Resistance against the “Israeli” occupation was extremely strong and very clear. Whether in Palestine or in Lebanon, he was among the first who supported the Resistance’s military operations against the occupation, his positions in supporting the Resistance gained him a wide reputation and he was called by the western media as the spiritual guide of the Resistance fighters.
Many of the prominent cadres of the Islamic Resistance were among his students. He influenced a whole generation and raised the awareness about the importance of the resistance in sabotaging the enemies’ conspiracies and in bringing liberation, dignity and victory to Lebanon and the Lebanese.
As we commemorate the 13th anniversary of his death, he will always be remembered, revered and respected, and he will continue to serve as an icon of all the sublime meanings he sacrificed and lived his life for.
US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr criticizes all walks of life within the US, underlining his opposition to how it conducts its foreign policy.
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a campaign event on April 19, 2023, in Boston (AP)
US Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vehemently and extensively criticized the United States on Monday during a speech before the Free State Project, where he touched on numerous issues, from the war in Ukraine to bioweapons, US bases on foreign soil, and the cases of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
Operation Paperclip, the CIA’s first project, aimed to bring Nazi scientists to the United States after World War II. These scientists were employed to work on developing missiles, nuclear weapons, and bioweapons at high-security labs such as Fort Dietrich, as well as other facilities across the nation, the Democratic candidate revealed.
He also revealed that the CIA sought to enlist Japanese scientists, known for their use of bioweapons during World War II, to participate in the development of a pilot weapons program.
“It’s to begin developing a pilot weapons program and to get the Japanese scientists who are the only ones who would ever use actually use bioweapons against the Chinese and kill many, many tens, hundreds of thousands of Chinese before and during World War II with bioweapons,” he underlined.
Kennedy also highlighted how then-US President Richard Nixon unilaterally announced the end of the bio-weapons program in 1969, when he went to Fort Dietrich and announced the program’s end.
“The American government was going to stop developing bioweapons no matter what anybody else in the world did […] Nixon closed the Fort Dietrich. They turned it over to NIH (National Institutes of Health) right before that, and they destroyed all the bioweapons before they went destroyed it. The CIA went in and got cultures of all of them and moved them to warehouses in New York and elsewhere,” he revealed.
Biolabs and biological weapons are of utmost importance in the current state of affairs, as it was discovered that the United States has been helping with the construction of biolabs in Ukraine. Initially, Washington refused to admit the existence of US Biolabs in Ukraine, however, later in time Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland did.
“Russian troops have secured over 20,000 documents, reference, and analytical materials, and interviewed eyewitnesses and participants in American military-biological programs,” since the start of the Ukraine war, Russian Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense chief Igor Kirillov said earlier this year.
US provocations to blame for Ukraine war
Turning to the conflict in Ukraine, he said recent revelations indicate that President Putin and President Zelensky signed an agreement in April 2022, which outlined the withdrawal of Russian troops from around Kiev, adding that they were complying with the agreement’s stipulations. However, he alleged that then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, acting on behalf of the White House, attempted to undermine the accord in question.
“That’s not the first time we’ve we’ve done that […] all the nations like France, Germany, and Russia all agreed to the Minsk accords earlier on,” he underlined.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted in February that he had previously told German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron that the Minsk agreements were “impossible”, and he did not plan on implementing them.
Weeks before the Ukraine war broke out, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia was yet to hear Ukraine’s words about readiness to swiftly start the implementation of the Minsk agreements during the meeting between Macron and Zelensky.
Ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was in office from 2005 to 2021 said in an interview published in early December that the Minsk Accords were signed to “give Ukraine time” to strengthen itself.
Merkel said “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It also used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”
Man of peace
The Ukrainian people, yearning for peace, elected President Zelensky, a comedian and actor, based on his promise to sign the Minsk Accords, Kennedy underlined, highlighting that Zelensky broke his promise to the people of Ukraine. Yet, pressure from individuals like Victoria Nuland, in tandem with ultranationalist factions within Ukraine, pushed the government to pivot away from these agreements, he divulged.
The war in Ukraine has claimed the lives of an estimated 350,000 young men. While acknowledging the brutality and illegality of the conflict, the role of external provocations, including those by the United States since 1997, should also be looked into as a reason for the outbreak of the brutal war, Kennedy said.
“He ran as the peace candidate. You guys, this is a guy who is a comedian and an actor […] he was not a politician, a veteran politician. Why did people vote for him? They voted for him because he was the peace candidate, and the Ukrainian people wanted peace,” he said.
“I think it’s going to be quite easy to get out of the war in Ukraine,” the Democrat candidate added.
US military presence abroad
Another significant aspect he touched on was the excessive military expenditures of the United States. Despite promises of a peace dividend following the end of the Cold War, the country currently maintains approximately 800 military bases worldwide, surpassing other nations by a significant margin.
The exorbitant defense budget, now reaching $1.3 trillion dollars, far exceeding the original projection of $200 billion dollars, has impacted the economy, national strength, and the well-being of the middle class.
“The Chinese have one and a half bases. I don’t know if the Russians have any now, you know, outside of the Ukraine. I don’t know if they have any. And we have each one of those bases as a platform for a future war,” the presidential candidate highlighted.
“We were told we were going to get a peace dividend [after the collapse of the Soviet Union]. We were told that we would stop investing billion of dollars in bombers that can’t fly in the rain. And then we would bring that money home to build schools and roads and infrastructure and help it lower taxes and help, you know, help farmers convert to regenerative agriculture […] But none of that happened,” the nephew of former US President John Kennedy said.
RFK had previously explained that Russia made it clear what its demands were before the war began and that the US should have given in to its demands. He explained that the US and NATO continued to move eastward after agreeing with the dismantled Soviet Union in 1991 that they would not do so.
“We spend three times what China spends. It’s not good for our economy. It’s not good for our national strength. And it has not helped American security or safety,” he added, arguing that the US, instead, was in “much more danger” due to its military “adventures” abroad.
He proposed winding down military ventures and redirecting resources towards rebuilding the country’s industrial base and fostering entrepreneurial opportunities for Americans. This, he argues, would allow for a more secure and prosperous future.
Furthermore, he pledged that if he were to become president, he would wind down the country’s military spending and start instead rebuilding its industrial base.
Assange, Snowden to be pardoned
Finally, in a bold and shocking statement, Kennedy pledged to pardon both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden if he were to be elected as president, highlighting the lack of support from the American press and publishers for Assange’s release. Kennedy emphasized the importance of recognizing Assange’s role as a publisher and stressed the significance of his actions in exposing classified information to the public.
Moreover, he turned his attention to Edward Snowden, asserting that Congress has effectively made a case for his pardon. He referred to the revelations Snowden brought to light, revealing extensive surveillance practices by the intelligence apparatus. Kennedy highlighted the unlawful collection and archiving of personal data, which came as a shock to both the public and Congress itself. Subsequently, Congress passed legislation aimed at safeguarding citizens against such encroachments on privacy.
Kennedy maintained that Snowden’s actions aligned with deeply held American values, including the pursuit of personal courage and the defense of democratic ideals. By exposing the mass surveillance programs, Snowden contributed to the ongoing debate surrounding privacy rights and government transparency.
His public support for pardoning both Assange and Snowden underscores the growing recognition of their impact on public awareness and the need to reassess the treatment of whistleblowers in the United States.
Assange has been at the Belmarsh prison in London for more than 1,500 days. He was unlawfully charged in the US with 17 counts of “espionage” and one count of computer misuse, connected to him leaking tens of thousands of military and diplomatic documents that exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Assange is currently facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, which marks a new precedent, as the legislation was never utilized against classified information being made public.
In Assange’s case, he’s been unlawfully charged in the US with 17 counts of “espionage” and one count of computer misuse, connected to him leaking tens of thousands of military and diplomatic documents that exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The journalist faces a 175-year prison sentence following the approval of extradition to the US by the UK High Court in December 2021.
Kennedy has long been vocal against the Ukraine war and the way the US government handles domestic issues and its foreign policy, and he is making a bid for the presidency on a democratic platform.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 