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Paul Merrell

US-Saudi Blitz into Yemen: Naked Aggression, Absolute Desperation | Global Research - C... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5439141

war & peace Yemen Houthi Saudis invasion U.S.-foreign-policy terrorists™

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The “proxy war” model the US has been employing throughout the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and even in parts of Asia appears to have failed yet again, this time in the Persian Gulf state of Yemen. Overcoming the US-Saudi backed regime in Yemen, and a coalition of sectarian extremists including Al Qaeda and its rebrand, the “Islamic State,” pro-Iranian Yemeni Houthi militias have turned the tide against American “soft power” and has necessitated a more direct military intervention. While US military forces themselves are not involved allegedly, Saudi warplanes and a possible ground force are. Though Saudi Arabia claims “10 countries” have joined its coalition to intervene in Yemen, like the US invasion and occupation of Iraq hid behind a “coalition,” it is overwhelmingly a Saudi operation with “coalition partners” added in a vain attempt to generate diplomatic legitimacy. The New York Times, even in the title of its report, “Saudi Arabia Begins Air Assault in Yemen,” seems not to notice these “10” other countries. It reports:
  • Saudi Arabia announced on Wednesday night that it had launched a military campaign in Yemen, the beginning of what a Saudi official said was an offensive to restore a Yemeni government that had collapsed after rebel forces took control of large swaths of the country.  The air campaign began as the internal conflict in Yemen showed signs of degenerating into a proxy war between regional powers. The Saudi announcement came during a rare news conference in Washington by Adel al-Jubeir, the kingdom’s ambassador to the United States.
  • Indeed, the conflict in Yemen is a proxy war. Not between Iran and Saudi Arabia per say, but between Iran and the United States, with the United States electing Saudi Arabia as its unfortunate stand-in. Iran’s interest in Yemen serves as a direct result of the US-engineered “Arab Spring” and attempts to overturn the political order of North Africa and the Middle East to create a unified sectarian front against Iran for the purpose of a direct conflict with Tehran. The war raging in Syria is one part of this greater geopolitical conspiracy, aimed at overturning one of Iran’s most important regional allies, cutting the bridge between it and another important ally, Hezbollah in Lebanon. And while Iran’s interest in Yemen is currently portrayed as yet another example of Iranian aggression, indicative of its inability to live in peace with its neighbors, US policymakers themselves have long ago already noted that Iran’s influence throughout the region, including backing armed groups, serves a solely defensive purpose, acknowledging the West and its regional allies’ attempts to encircle, subvert, and overturn Iran’s current political order.
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  • What may result is a conflict that spills over Yemen’s borders and into Saudi Arabia proper. Whatever dark secrets the Western media’s decades of self-censorship regarding the true sociopolitical nature of Saudi Arabia will become apparent when the people of the Arabian peninsula must choose to risk their lives fighting for a Western client regime, or take a piece of the peninsula for themselves. Additionally, a transfer of resources and fighters arrayed under the flag of the so-called “Islamic State” and Al Qaeda from Syria to the Arabian Peninsula will further indicate that the US and its regional allies have been behind the chaos and atrocities carried out in the Levant for the past 4 years. Such revelations will only further undermine the moral imperative of the West and its regional allies, which in turn will further sabotage their efforts to rally support for an increasingly desperate battle they themselves conspired to start.
  • The aerial assault on Yemen is meant to impress upon onlookers Saudi military might. A ground contingent might also attempt to quickly sweep in and panic Houthi fighters into folding. Barring a quick victory built on psychologically overwhelming Houthi fighters, Saudi Arabia risks enveloping itself in a conflict that could easily escape out from under the military machine the US has built for it. It is too early to tell how the military operation will play out and how far the Saudis and their US sponsors will go to reassert themselves over Yemen. However, that the Houthis have outmatched combined US-Saudi proxy forces right on Riyadh’s doorstep indicates an operational capacity that may not only survive the current Saudi assault, but be strengthened by it. Reports that Houthi fighters have employed captured Yemeni warplanes further bolsters this notion – revealing tactical, operational, and strategic sophistication that may well know how to weather whatever the Saudis have to throw at it, and come back stronger.
  • The unelected hereditary regime ruling over Saudi Arabia, a nation notorious for egregious human rights abuses, and a land utterly devoid of even a semblance of what is referred to as “human rights,” is now posing as arbiter of which government in neighboring Yemen is “legitimate” and which is not, to the extent of which it is prepared to use military force to restore the former over the latter. The United States providing support for the Saudi regime is designed to lend legitimacy to what would otherwise be a difficult narrative to sell. However, the United States itself has suffered from an increasing deficit in its own legitimacy and moral authority. Most ironic of all, US and Saudi-backed sectarian extremists, including Al Qaeda in Yemen, had served as proxy forces meant to keep Houthi militias in check by proxy so the need for a direct military intervention such as the one now unfolding would not be necessary. This means that Saudi Arabia and the US are intervening in Yemen only after the terrorists they were supporting were overwhelmed and the regime they were propping up collapsed. In reality, Saudi Arabia’s and the United States’ rhetoric aside, a brutal regional regime meddled in Yemen and lost, and now the aspiring global hemegon sponsoring it from abroad has ordered it to intervene directly and clean up its mess.
  • the Yemeni people are not being allowed to determine their own affairs. Everything up to and including military invasion has been reserved specifically to ensure that the people of Yemen do not determine things for themselves, clearly, because it does not suit US interests. Such naked hypocrisy will be duly noted by the global public and across diplomatic circles. The West’s inability to maintain a cohesive narrative is a growing sign of weakness. Shareholders in the global enterprise the West is engaged in may see such weakness as a cause to divest – or at the very least – a cause to diversify toward other enterprises. Such enterprises may include Russia and China’s mulipolar world. The vanishing of Western global hegemony will be done in destructive conflict waged in desperation and spite. Today, that desperation and spite befalls Yemen.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 15
     
    Usually I agree with Tony Cartalucci, but I think it's too early to pick winners and losers in Yemen. At least a couple of other nations allied with the Saudis are flying aerial missions and there's a commitment of troops and air support by Egypt, although it isn't clear that these would enter Yemen, but may just deploy to "protect" the waters approaching the Suez Canal from the Yemenis. The Saudis have a surfeit of U.S. weaponry but their military is inexperienced. The House of Saud has preferred proxy wars conducted by Salafist mercenaries over direct military intervention. How effective its military will be is a very big unknown at this point. But I like Cartalucci's point that if the House of Saud has to send in its ISIL mercenaries, it will go a long way toward unmasking the U.S. excuse for invading Syria and resuming boots on the ground in Iraq.
Paul Merrell

Turkey's Erdogan Gets Taste of His Own Medicine? « LewRockwell.com Blog - 0 views

www.lewrockwell.com/...138449.html

war & peace Syria Turkey Iran Russia Arab Spring Pipelinestan false flag

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • After nearly a week of increasing public protests in Turkey, ostensibly over government plans to turn a last bit of green space in Istanbul into another shopping mall, matters became far more serious on Friday. Riot police descended on the protestors with various forms of tear gas (and possibly worse chemical and biological agents -- raw sewage?) and water cannon, blasting everyone and everything in sight including non-participants. When they caught protestors, they beat them violently and brutally, as can be seen in this video. Photographs show that police fired tear gas into crowded underground metro stations, leading to panic and worse. Istanbul looks like a war zone. Today indications are that protests have only increased in number and fury in response to the violence with which they were met yesterday.
  • Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come under increased criticism at home over his enthusiastic support for those fighting to overthrow the government in neighboring Syria. Turkish government support for the rebels came early and has included providing safe havens for the Islamist insurgents and safe passage into Syria from Libya, Yemen, and other countries of the insurgents' origin. Erdogan's stated policy of "zero problems with neighbors" has been turned on its head by his support for the rebels fighting next door. Public dissatisfaction with the Turkish government's policy of encouraging an Islamist insurgency next door has steadily increased. The insurgents fighting the Syrian government were still unsatisfied by the level of support they received from their Turkish hosts and they took to false flag attacks in places like Reyhanli and a planned false-flag sarin gas attack on southern Turkey in Adana in attempt to provoke a Turkish (and NATO) military response against Syria.
  • Suddenly the tables are turned at home. Faced with a nascent but growing protest movement of his own, Erdogan expresses a very different view toward the people in the street. The Prime Minister strongly supported the "Arab Spring" overthrow in Egypt and supports the overthrow of Assad next door because he said the leaders of these countries did not listen to their people. Just last week he met with President Obama and agreed that "Assad must go." Now with protesters in Turkey chanting "Erdogan must go" he is singing a different tune. Now "the people" he claimed to speak for -- on the streets in Egypt and Syria, at least -- were, in Turkey, "with terror, have dark ties," in his words. Suddenly "the people" are not so noble when they are calling for his ouster. With the tables turned on Erdogan, he can only demand order! "I call on the protesters to stop their demonstrations immediately," he thundered yesterday. Erdogan caught the tiger by the tail and thought he would become a new Ottoman Sultan. Reality bites back hard on the streets of Istanbul and elsewhere. This is far from over.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Jun 13
     
    The U.S. Pipelinestan war-by-proxy against Syria as a proxy for war against Iran as a proxy for war against Russia's lock on the natural gas market for the E.U. continues to run up against a rock wall of unanticipated consequences. With U.S. Patriot missile batteries stationed along Turkey's border with Syria through which Qatar's mercenary Al Qaeda forces are infiltrated and supplied, Turkey's autocratic government suddenly faces its own Arab Spring uprising.  With Obama trumpeting that Syrian use of chemical weapons would "cross a red line" justifying direct U.S. intervention, a mercenary false flag chemical attack in Turkey is unmasked. 
Paul Merrell

Military Success in Syria Gives Putin Upper Hand in U.S. Proxy War - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-syria-putin-us-proxy-war.html

war & peace Syria U.S.-foreign-policy weapons-shipments Russia war by proxy

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • “Russia has won the proxy war, at least for now,” said Michael Kofman, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.Russia’s battlefield successes in Syria have given Moscow, isolated by the West after its annexation of Crimea and other incursions into Ukraine, new leverage in decisions about the future of the Middle East.
  • The Obama administration is now talking with President Vladimir V. Putin’s government about a plan to share intelligence and coordinate airstrikes against the Islamic State and other militant groups in Syria, and Mr. Putin has thus far met his goals in Syria without becoming caught in a quagmire that some — including President Obama — had predicted he would.
  • Some of the rebel groups boasted at the time that powerful TOW antitank missiles provided by American and Saudi intelligence operatives were a key to their success. For several years, the C.I.A. has joined with the spy services of several Arab nations to arm and train the rebels at bases in Jordan and Qatar, with the Saudis bankrolling much of the operation. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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  • Rebel groups in recent days have made surprising gains in a new offensive to try to break through Syrian military lines encircling Aleppo, but if it fails, rebels inside the city will face a choice between enduring the siege or surrendering.
  • n recent interviews, rebel commanders said the flow of foreign weapons needed to break the siege had slowed. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “We are using most of our weapons in the battle for Aleppo,” said Mustafa al-Hussein, a member of Suqour al-Jabal, one of the C.I.A.-backed groups. He said the flow of weapons to the group had diminished in the past three to four months.“Now we fire them only when it is necessary and urgent,” he said.Another commander, Maj. Mousa al-Khalad of Division 13, a C.I.A.-backed rebel group operating in Idlib and Aleppo, said his group had received no missiles for two weeks.“We filed a request to get TOW missiles for the Aleppo front,” he said, but the reply was that there were none in the warehouses.Rebel leaders and military experts say that perhaps the most pressing danger is that supply routes from Turkey, which are essential to the C.I.A.-backed rebels, could be severed.“The U.S. is doing just enough to placate its allies and partners and says it is doing something, but does not seek to do what it takes to change conditions on the battlefield,” said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and an Assad critic.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Aug 16
     
    Noteworthy: The New York Times finally labels the Syrian War as a U.S. proxy war, against Russia, rather than against the coalition of Syria, Russia, Iran, Iraq, and the Lebanese Hezbollah.
Paul Merrell

U.S. Strategy to Fight Terrorism Increasingly Uses Proxies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...increasingly-uses-proxies.html

war & peace war by proxy Africa U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • During the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States military often carried out dozens of daily operations against Al Qaeda and other extremist targets with heavily armed commandos and helicopter gunships.But even before President Obama’s speech on Wednesday sought to underscore a shift in counterterrorism strategy — away from the Qaeda strongholds in and near those countries — American forces had changed their tactics in combating Al Qaeda and its affiliates, relying more on allied or indigenous troops with a limited American combat role.
  • Navy SEAL or Army Delta Force commandos will still carry out raids against the most prized targets, such as the seizure last fall of a Libyan militant wanted in the 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa. But more often than not, the Pentagon is providing intelligence and logistics assistance to proxies, including African troops and French commandos fighting Islamist extremists in Somalia and Mali. And it is increasingly training foreign troops — from Niger to Yemen to Afghanistan — to battle insurgents on their own territory so that American armies will not have to.
  • To confront several crises in Africa, the United States has turned to helping proxies. In Somalia, for instance, the Pentagon and the State Department support a 22,000-member African force that has driven the Shabab from their former strongholds in Mogadishu, the capital, and other urban centers, and continues to battle the extremists in their mountain and desert redoubts.
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  • In the Central African Republic, American transport planes ferried 1,700 peacekeepers from Burundi and Rwanda to the strife-torn nation earlier this year, but refrained from putting American boots on the ground.The United States flies unarmed reconnaissance drones from a base in Niger to support French and African troops in Mali, but it has conspicuously stayed out of that war, even after the conflict helped spur a terrorist attack in Algeria in which Americans were taken hostage.In addition to proxies, the Pentagon is training and equipping foreign armies to tackle their own security challenges. In the past two years, the Defense Department has gradually increased its presence in Yemen, sending about 50 Special Operations troops to train Yemeni counterterrorism and security forces, and a like number of commandos to help identify and target Qaeda suspects for drone strikes, according to American officials.
  • Across Africa this year, soldiers from a 3,500-member brigade in the Army’s First Infantry Division are conducting more than 100 missions, ranging from a two-man sniper team in Burundi to humanitarian exercises in South Africa.
  • Last October, for instance, American troops assisted by F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents seized a suspected Qaeda leader on the streets of Tripoli, Libya, while on the same day a Navy SEAL team raided the seaside villa of a militant leader in a firefight on the coast of Somalia. The Navy commandos exchanged gunfire with militants at the home of a senior leader of the Shabab but were ultimately forced to withdraw.The Libyan militant captured in Tripoli was indicted in 2000 for his role in the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The militant, born Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai and known by his nom de guerre, Abu Anas al-Libi, had a $5 million bounty on his head; his capture at dawn ended a 15-year manhunt.
  • Mr. Ruqai was taken to Manhattan for trial after being held for a week in military custody aboard a Navy vessel in the Mediterranean, where he was reportedly interrogated for intelligence purposes. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go to trial in November.
Paul Merrell

Paris Shooters Just Returned from NATO's Proxy War in Syria | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...-from-natos-proxy-war-in-syria

war & peace France false-flag terrorists™ Charlie-Hedbo

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • In an all too familiar pattern and as predicted, the shooters involved in the attack in Paris Wednesday, January 7, 2015, were French citizens, radicalized in Europe and exported to Syria to fight in NATO’s proxy war against the government in Damascus, then brought back where they have now carried out a domestic attack. Additionally, as have been many other domestic attacks, the suspects were long under the watch of Western intelligence services, with at least one suspect having already been arrested on terrorism charges.
  • USA Today would report in an article titled, “Manhunt continues for two French terror suspects,” that: The suspects are two brothers — Said, 34, and Cherif Kouachi, 32, both French nationals — and Hamyd Mourad, 18, whose nationality wasn’t known, a Paris police official told the Associated Press. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. USA Today would also report (emphasis added): The brothers were born in Paris of Algerian descent. Cherif was sentenced to three years in prison on terrorism charges in May 2008. Both brothers returned from Syria this summer.
  • As with any false flag attack engineered by a government for the purpose of manipulating public perception and pushing through otherwise unjustifiable policy both foreign and domestic, a series of canards are erected to distract the public from the true nature of the attack. In the recent attack in Paris, France, the canards of “free speech,” “condemning radical Islam,” “tolerance,” and “extremism” have all taken center stage, displacing the fact that the terrorists who carried out the attack were long on the leash not of “Islamic extremists” but Western intelligence agencies, fighting in a Western proxy war, as a member of a well-funded, armed, and trained mercenary force that has, on record since as early as 2007, been an essential component of Western foreign policy. Indeed, Al Qaeda and its various rebrandings are not the creation of “Islamic extremism,” but rather Western foreign policy using “extremism” as part of indoctrinating the rank and file, but directed by and solely for the purpose of serving an entirely Western agenda.
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  • The implications of yet another case of Western-radicalized terrorists, first exported to fight NATO’s proxy war in Syria, then imported and well-known to Western intelligence agencies, being able to carry out a highly organized, well-executed attack, is that the attack itself was sanctioned and engineered by Western intelligence agencies themselves,. This mirrors almost verbatim the type of operations NATO intelligence carried out during the Cold War with similar networks of radicalized militants used both as foreign mercenaries and domestic provocateurs. Toward the end of the Cold War, one of these militant groups was literally Al Qaeda – a proxy mercenary front armed, funded, and employed by the West to this very day. Additionally, in all likelihood, the brothers who took part in the attack in Paris may have been fighting in Syria with weapons provided to them by the French government itself.  France 24 would report last year in an article titled, “France delivered arms to Syrian rebels, Hollande confirms,” that: President Francois Hollande said on Thursday that France had delivered weapons to rebels battling the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad “a few months ago.” Deflecting blame for the current attack on “radical Islam” is but a canard obscuring the truth that these terrorists were created intentionally by the West, to fight the West’s enemies abroad, and to intimidate and terrorize their populations at home.
  • As exposed by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 2007 article,  “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” it was stated explicitly that (emphasis added): To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.  To this day, the US, its NATO partners including Turkey, and regional partners including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are arming, funding, harboring, training, and otherwise perpetuating these “Islamic extremists” within and along both Syria and now Iraq’s borders.
  • In reality, without Western backing, “laundered” through the Persian Gulf autocracies and manifesting themselves in a global network of mosques jointly run by Persian Gulf and Western intelligence agencies, there would be no “Islamic extremism” to speak of. To focus on “extremism” as a cause, rather than as a means used by the true perpetrators of this global-spanning campaign of Western-sanctioned terrorism, is not only to perpetuate such canards, but to invite the perpetuation of this very terrorism we are shocked and horrified by.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Jan 15
     
    Cartalucci appears to be stretching the evidence a bit here. The possibility remains that the Paris attack was "blowback" not approved by western covert action agency. But in that event, the involved agency's monitoring of the monsters it creates was certainly deficient. 
Paul Merrell

FBI Director: Sony's 'Sloppy' North Korean Hackers Revealed Their IP Addresses | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...s-failed-use-proxies-sony-hack

war & peace cyberwar North-Korea Sony-hack FBI Comey

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration has been tightlipped about its controversial naming of the North Korean government as the definitive source of the hack that eviscerated Sony Pictures Entertainment late last year. But FBI director James Comey is standing by the bureau’s conclusion, and has offered up a few tiny breadcrumbs of the evidence that led to it. Those crumbs include the claim that Sony hackers sometimes failed to use the proxy servers that masked the origin of their attack, revealing IP addresses that the FBI says were used exclusively by North Korea. Speaking at a Fordham Law School cybersecurity conference Wednesday, Comey said that he has “very high confidence” in the FBI’s attribution of the attack to North Korea. And he named several of the sources of his evidence, including a “behavioral analysis unit” of FBI experts trained to psychologically analyze foes based on their writings and actions. He also said that the FBI compared the Sony attack with their own “red team” simulations to determine how the attack could have occurred. And perhaps most importantly, Comey now says that the hackers in the attack failed on multiple occasions to use the proxy servers that bounce their Internet connection through an obfuscating computer somewhere else in the world, revealing IP addresses that tied them to North Koreans.
  • “In nearly every case, [the Sony hackers known as the Guardians of Peace] used proxy servers to disguise where they were coming from in sending these emails and posting these statements. But several times they got sloppy,” Comey said. “Several times, either because they forgot or because of a technical problem, they connected directly and we could see that the IPs they were using…were exclusively used by the North Koreans.” “They shut it off very quickly once they saw the mistake,” he added. “But not before we saw where it was coming from.” Comey’s brief and cryptic remarks—with no opportunity for followup questions from reporters—respond to skepticism and calls for more evidence from cybersecurity experts unsatisfied with the FBI’s vague statements tying the hack to North Korean government. In a previous public announcement the FBI had said only that it found “similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks,” as well as IP addresses that matched prior attacks it knows to have originated in North Korea. At that time, the FBI also said it had further evidence matching the tools used in the attack to a North Korean hacking attack that hit South Korean banks and media outlets.
  • Following those elliptical statements, the cybersecurity community demanded more information be released to prove North Korea’s involvement. Some have even signed a petition on the White House website calling for more transparency in the investigation. Well-known security blogger and author Bruce Schneier has compared the FBI’s “trust us” mentality to the claims of the Bush administration about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War. Without more information, security experts themselves have remained deeply divided in their conclusions about who hacked Sony.
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  • That pseudo-explanation will likely do little to quell the security community’s doubts. Even if the hackers appeared to fail to use proxies on some occasions, it could still be very difficult to be sure those “real” IP addresses weren’t proxies themselves designed to serve as further misdirection. And a nagging loose thread remains that the Guardians of Peace hackers in their initial statements to Sony tried to extort money from the company before making any political demands. Sony’s Kim Jong-un assassination comedy “The Interview,” the suppression of which is believed by many to be the North Korean government’s motive in the hack, wasn’t even mentioned by the hackers until long after the intrusion was underway. Comey didn’t address that plot hole in the North Korean explanation in his speech.
Paul Merrell

M of A - ISIS Moves To Syria Where Erdogan Still Aims For Aleppo - 0 views

www.moonofalabama.org/...gan-still-aims-for-aleppo.html

war & peace Syria sitrep Russia Turkey ISIL Mosul Aleppo Deir-Ezzor

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The Iraqi army started a large operation to liberate Mosul from Islamic State jihadists. But the forces, in total some 40,000, are still several dozen kilometers away from the city limits. They will have to capture several towns and villages and pass many IED obstacles before coming near to the center and house to house fighting. It might take many month to eliminated the last stay-behind ISIS cells in Mosul. About one million civilians live in Mosul. Many, many more than in east-Aleppo. Many of them were sympathetic with the new overlords when ISIS stormed in two years ago. French, American, Kurdish, Iraqi and Turkish artillery are pounding them now. Airstrikes attack even the smallest fighting position. When the city will be conquered it will likely be destroyed. The imminent fight over Mosul might be the reason why John Kerry dialed down his hypocritical howling over east-Aleppo in Syria which is under attack from Syrian and Russian forces. The attack on Mosul proceeds on three axes. From the north Kurdish Peshmerga under U.S. special force advisors lead the fighting. Iraqi forces attack from the east and south. The way to the west, towards Syria, is open. The intend of the U.S. is to let ISIS fighters, several thousand of them, flee to Deir Ezzor and Raqqa in Syria. They are needed there to further destroy the Syrian state.
  • We pointed out here that this move will create the "Salafist principality" the U.S. and its allies have striven to install in east-Syria since 2012. The "mistake" of the U.S. bombing of Syrian army positions in Deir Ezzor was in support of that plan. Other commentators finally catch up with that conclusion. The Turks are openly talking about such an escape plan for ISIS in Mosul. The Turkish news agency Anadolu published this "sensitive" operations plan. Point 4 says: An escape corridor into Syria will be left for Daesh so they can vacate Mosul
  • Two points in the Turkish plan will not come true. The Iraqi government has ordered that no Turkish troops take part in the Mosul operation and will designate them as enemies should they try. The Sunni "Nineveh Guard", trained by Turkey, paid by the Saudis and led by the former Anbar governor Atheel al-Nujaifi, will also be excluded. It was the Saudi proxy al-Nujaifi who practically handed Anbar over to ISIS by ordering his troops to flee when ISIS attacked. He and his Saudi and Turkish sponsors want to create an independent Sunni statelet in west Iraq just like the Kurds created their own entity within north Iraq. The U.S. hopes that the influx of ISIS fighters into Syria will keep the Russians and Iranians trapped in the "quagmire" Obama prescribed and finally destroy the Syrian state. It seems to have mostly given up on other plans. The U.S. military now acknowledges that fighting the Russian air defense in Syria would be a real challenge: "It’s not like we’ve had any shoot at an F-35,” the official said of the next-generation U.S. fighter jet. “We’re not sure if any of our aircraft can defeat the S-300.”
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  • There is a "no-fly zone" over west-Syria and it is the Russians who control it. All U.S. and Turkish talk about such a zone is moot. The Obama administration has for now also given up on other plans. The recent National Security Council meeting deferred on further decisions: Consideration of other alternatives, including the shipment of arms to U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in Syria, and an increase in the quantity and quality of weapons supplied to opposition fighters in Aleppo and elsewhere, were deferred until later, officials said. U.S. military action to stop Syrian and Russian bombing of civilians was even further down the list of possibilities. The only U.S. "hope" for its Syria plans is now the facilitation of another ISIS influx. That and the CIA coordinated actions of its allies. The Saudis Foreign Minister announced that his country will increase weapons flow to its al-Qaeda proxies in Syria. The "rebels" are still receiving TOW anti-tank missiles and other heavy weapons. Turkish proxy forces, some Syrians, some "Turkmen" from Chechnya and elsewhere, have taken Dabiq from ISIS. The village is said to become a focal point of a future apocalyptic Christian-Muslim battle. A lot of "western" commentators pointed to that as a reason why ISIS would fight for it. But that battle is only predicted for the period after the return of the Mahdi which has not been announced. The current ideological value of Dabiq is therefore low and, like in Jarablus, ISIS cooperated well and moved out before the Turkish proxies moved in. The Russians had allowed Turkey to enter Syria only within a limit of some 15 kilometers south of the Turkish border. Heavy artillery would have to stay on the Turkish side. The sole original purpose of the Turkish invasion was to prevent a Kurdish corridor from the eastern Kurdish areas in Syria to Afrin in the west. Such a corridor would have limited ISIS access to Turkey.
  • The Kurdish corridor has been prevented and ISIS access to Turkish controlled areas and Turkey itself is as open as ever. The Turkish military sees this as sufficient for its aims: Taking control of Dabiq had eliminated the threat to Turkey from rockets fired by the jihadists, the Turkish Armed Forces said in a written statement.
  • The Turkish military wants to halt the operation. But Erdogan and his proxies forces want to go further south and west to attack the Syrian army encirclement of east-Aleppo: President Tayyip Erdogan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said on Sunday Dabiq's liberation was a "strategic and symbolic victory" against Islamic State. He told Reuters it was important strategically that the Turkey-backed forces continue their advance toward the Islamic State stronghold of al-Bab. To move to al-Bab Turkish artillery, with its units relying on conscripts, would have to move south of the Turkish-Syrian border. Any attack on them by the Syrian or Russian forces would thus become legal. Kurdish guerilla would be a constant threat. This explains the new split between the Turkish military and political forces. It will be interesting to watch how that dispute develops. For Thursday the Russian command announced a unilateral temporary ceasefire in east-Aleppo to let the Jihadis move out. British and other special forces, said to be embedded with al-Qaeda, will be happy for the chance to leave. In Iraq some Shia militia are moving towards Tal Afar to cut of the ISIS path to the west. Russia promised to take political and military measures should it detect an ISIS move. In east-Syria the Russian and Syrian air-forces, Hizbullah and more Shia militia from Iraq are now preparing surprises for the expected ISIS influx from Mosul. How much can they risk when the U.S. provides further air-support for the ISIS move?
Paul Merrell

M of A - Are Green Berets Leading The YPG In Taking The Azaz Pocket? - 0 views

www.moonofalabama.org/...in-taking-the-azaz-pocket.html

war & peace Syria YPG Kurds green-berets CIA

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The Syrian Arab Army and the YPG troops of the Syrian Kurds are making good progress in the Azaz pocket. The pocket formed after the Syrian army cut through the "rebel" corridor between Aleppo city and the Turkish border. The aim now is to push all foreign proxy forces who are still in that pocket (green) back north into Turkey and to get full control of the border.
  • The Syrian-Russian command decided to let the YPG (yellow) have the fun of cleaning the pocket only to taunt the Turkish President Erdogan. Erdogan has a serious domestic policy problems when the Kurdish forces gain control in parts of Syria that the wannabe Sultan Erdogan regarded as sacred neo-Ottoman ground. His court jester, the Prime Minister Davutoglu, announced that his country would not allow the town of Azaz to fall to Kurdish fighters. He will have to eat a flock of craws over that. The Turks are firing artillery from Turkish ground in the north onto Kurdish position in the pocket. Turkish special forces are likely near the front line to control that fire. But artillery alone can not make the difference. The Kurds have air support from the Russian airforce which Turkey no longer dares to attack. The Russians will not attack the Turkish artillery as such an attack could widen the war. The Kurdish troops will have to suffer through that barrage as they push out the Turkish and CIA paid proxies. Some reinforcement for the CIA proxies arrived from Idleb. These passed from Idleb into Turkey and from Turkey into the pocket. The destruction of these forces in the Azaz pocket will make the further fights  of the Syrian army in Idleb and elsewhere a lot easier.
  • Who are the professionals that are helping the YPG to take the Azaz pocket? My first thought was of course Russian Spetsnaz. But I asked around and none of my usual sources would confirm this. The sources acknowledged that the YPG in west Syria has special force support but there was some quite unexpected silence over who these forces were. It is clear to me that these are not Syrian special forces. The YPG does not want to be seen as a adjunct to the Syrian government. No one would confirm to me that these are Russian forces even as that would be of no great surprise to anyone. This leads me to speculate that some U.S. special forces are directing the YPG in the Azaz pocket. This in coordination with the Syrian army and the Russians. Is that a crazy thought? Consider: The Syrian YPG Kurds are supported by the U.S. military. They received weapons and ammunition from the U.S. military and, at least in the east, have some U.S. military special forces embedded with them. These Pentagon supported YPG troops currently fight foreign proxy forces in the Azaz pocket which are supported, equipped and paid by the CIA, the Saudis, the Turks and other Arab U.S. "allies". The CIA is running the show. The Turkish NATO member is shelling the Pentagon supported YPG to protect the CIA supported "moderate rebels". The current CIA director was once the CIA Chief of Station in Riyadh and has intimate connection to the Saudi rulers (and their pockets?). It was the military's Defense Intelligence Agency that warned in 2012 of the emergence of a "Salafist Principality" - the Islamic State - in Syria and Iraq. It warned against continuing the CIA support for the "rebels". It was the Pentagon that sabotaged the White House intent to create another "moderate rebel" force to attack the Islamic State:
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  • Clearly, the Pentagon hates the CIA support for the "moderate rebels". The CIA support has fed not only the "rebels" but also al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Continuing that path would likely result in a radical al-Qaeda controlled Syrian government and another thankless, years long military expedition to oust it. The U.S. has several kinds of special forces. The famed SEALs as well as the army's Delta Forces are by now mostly door kickers. They do night raids and other SWAT commando like stuff. The Army Rangers have joined them in the bloody business of killing Afghan farmers. The U.S. special forces that are trained and able to direct a local guerrilla are the Green Berets. A very discreet type of people that work in small teams and are trained in local languages and habits. So who is helping the Kurds. My hunch is that these are not the "polite green men" of the Russian Spetsnaz, who enabled the people of Crimea to rejoin with Russia, who are now helping the YPG. I believe that the Pentagon sent some of its own "green" people to help the YPG to kick the asses of the CIA supported Jihadis out of Syria. This in tight coordination with the Syrian and Russian forces.
  • The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’
  • The Obama administration for now decided to accept the Russian offer to pull its chestnuts out of the Syrian fire. But it does not want to give the Russian any credit for doing so. And while the Pentagon has firmly joined the Russian camp some years ago, the White House interventionist borg are ready to again change course and to again support the CIA, the Saudis and Turks in their "moderate Jihadis" mischief. The Green Berets, should they indeed be in north-west Syria, better do their job well and defeat the CIA proxies in a decisive manner. The above is speculative based solely on my personal hunch and it may be completely wrong. It would probably make for a good movie plot. But could it be right? Has the Pentagon send its specialists to help the Syrians, Russians and Kurds to kick out the CIA sponsored Jihadis? Please let me know your take.
Paul Merrell

US military involvement in Syria a 'mistake': Gates | ArabNews - 0 views

arabnews.com/451361

war & peace Syria Iran Russia Israel robert gates

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 May 13 - No Cached
  • Former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned yesterday that deepening US military involvement in Syria’s civil war would be a “mistake,” warning the outcome would be unpredictable and messy.
  • Gates’ comments on Syria come amid debate in Washington over whether to step up military support for rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad, even as the administration attempts a new peace initiative with Russia. “I thought it was a mistake in Libya, and I think it is a mistake in Syria, even if we had intervened more significantly in Syria a year ago or six months ago. We overestimate our ability to determine outcomes. “Caution, particularly in terms of arming these groups and in terms of US military involvement, is in order,” he said. “Anybody who says, ‘It’s going to be clean. It’s going to be neat. You can establish safe zones, and it’ll be just swell,’ well, most wars aren’t that way,” he said. Gates, who served under both George W Bush and President Barack Obama, was US defense secretary in 2011 when the United States joined a NATO-led air operation in Libya that helped rebels topple Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi.
  • WASHINGTON: Former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned yesterday that deepening US military involvement in Syria’s civil war would be a “mistake,” warning the outcome would be unpredictable and messy.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 May 13
     
    Gates' remarks follow similar warnings by several retired U.S. generals that the outcome of war with Syria would be unpredictable. This is a proxy war being waged by the U.S., which is providing "humanitarian" aid to the "rebels," whilst Saudi Arabia and Qatar ostensibly provide their weapons. (Ostensibly, because most of their weapons are being transported by U.S. proxies from Libya and most of the "rebels" are non-Syrian foreign fighters, largely al Queda, infiltrated into Syria via Turkey.) The U.S. has moved anti-aircraft missile teams into areas of Turkey and Jordan that border Syria, a move that was met by Russia moving its own advanced anti-aircraft missile teams into Syria itself and repositioning a sizeable part of the Russian Navy in Syria and ramping up its naval presence in the Mediterranean.   Meanwhile, Lebanon's Hezbollah has pledged unity with Syria's existing government and is adding soldiers to the Syrian Army's forces. Israel has responded with two air assaults on Syria, ostensibly to deny advanced weaponry to Hezbollah. Iran has also pledged military involvement if needed to preserve the existing Syrian government.  In sum, Syria is a very large powder keg with a very short fuse that could easily erupt into a larger war with Russia and Iran too, with the resulting closing of the Straits of Hormuz and thereby plunging the world into economic disaster resulting from severe oil shortages. Nonetheless, Neocons and Zionists in the U.S. are pushing hard for the U.S. to directly wade in militarily.  Civilian casualties in the so-called Syrian "civil war" are estimated to be between 80,000 and 120,000 thus far.   
Gary Edwards

Doug Hagmann: The Embassy Threat, Proxy War - America Conservative 2 Conservative - 0 views

americac2c.com/...n-the-embassy-threat-proxy-war

Benghazi Syria WWIII

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Aug 13
     
    The real story behind Benghazi, Syria and WWIII. excerpt: "Benghazi exposed .... It was shortly after the September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi that I wrote in explicit detail the actual reason for that attack. Thanks to a highly placed source in the intelligence venue, readers learned the truth ten months before the corporate media finally acknowledged that the compound in Benghazi was the operations center for a large CIA weapons smugglin... where Libya was being used as a weaponsstorage depot to arm the anti-Assad "rebels." The attack at Benghazi was described by this administration and the Clinton State Department as a spontaneous protest over an internet video, although that narrative was proven to be a lie. It was a lie they continued to stick with to hide the fact that the U.S., in conjunction with other NATO allies, were actually doing the work of Saudi Arabia. But why - who benefits? To understand the answer to that question, we must look at what Saudi Arabia is and how the Saudi royals came to power. Much like the U.S., the nation of Saudi Arabia itself is a captured operation, established by a cabal of globalists for the sake of oil. It would be helpful to understand the role Aramco and other oil interests played in the establishment of the Saudi power structure. As the Obama regime continued forward to advance this Saudi-globalist agenda, Russia's Putin warned the U.S. that the insanity of destabilizing Syria was not in their best interests, and certainly not in ours. When the warnings were not heeded, proxy groups for Russia, Syria and Iran, in the form of Ansar al Sharia and AQIM launched a deadly assault on the CIA operations center in Benghazi. The continued pressure of possibly exposing the true nature of the activities in Benghazi, from the illegal arms trafficking in violation of international law to the attack itself, became a serious annoyance to the globalist planners and the Obama subjects to the Saudi royals. The assistanc
Paul Merrell

ExposeFacts - For Whistleblowers, Journalism and Democracy - 0 views

exposefacts.org

transparency whistle-blowers resources Wikileaks Tail

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Launched by the Institute for Public Accuracy in June 2014, ExposeFacts.org represents a new approach for encouraging whistleblowers to disclose information that citizens need to make truly informed decisions in a democracy. From the outset, our message is clear: “Whistleblowers Welcome at ExposeFacts.org.” ExposeFacts aims to shed light on concealed activities that are relevant to human rights, corporate malfeasance, the environment, civil liberties and war. At a time when key provisions of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments are under assault, we are standing up for a free press, privacy, transparency and due process as we seek to reveal official information—whether governmental or corporate—that the public has a right to know. While no software can provide an ironclad guarantee of confidentiality, ExposeFacts—assisted by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and its “SecureDrop” whistleblower submission system—is utilizing the latest technology on behalf of anonymity for anyone submitting materials via the ExposeFacts.org website. As journalists we are committed to the goal of protecting the identity of every source who wishes to remain anonymous.
  • The seasoned editorial board of ExposeFacts will be assessing all the submitted material and, when deemed appropriate, will arrange for journalistic release of information. In exercising its judgment, the editorial board is able to call on the expertise of the ExposeFacts advisory board, which includes more than 40 journalists, whistleblowers, former U.S. government officials and others with wide-ranging expertise. We are proud that Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was the first person to become a member of the ExposeFacts advisory board. The icon below links to a SecureDrop implementation for ExposeFacts overseen by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and is only accessible using the Tor browser. As the Freedom of the Press Foundation notes, no one can guarantee 100 percent security, but this provides a “significantly more secure environment for sources to get information than exists through normal digital channels, but there are always risks.” ExposeFacts follows all guidelines as recommended by Freedom of the Press Foundation, and whistleblowers should too; the SecureDrop onion URL should only be accessed with the Tor browser — and, for added security, be running the Tails operating system. Whistleblowers should not log-in to SecureDrop from a home or office Internet connection, but rather from public wifi, preferably one you do not frequent. Whistleblowers should keep to a minimum interacting with whistleblowing-related websites unless they are using such secure software.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 07 Jun 14
       
      Thanks Paul! Great article and I agree with you about switching. Rather than a USB, I would rather look into a SSD and try to isolate performance to an ISP bandwidth issue. FYI, I read your Diigo posts daily at this Web site: https://groups.diigo.com/group/socialism-and-the-end-of-the-american-dream/content/user/marbux Seems to be the best visual presentation of your research. I do however think Diigo could improve their hosting of this research by enabling more extensive comments. Notice that your comments are often clipped :( Still, I really do appreciate your sharing both your research and your commentary. Priceless stuff! Many thanks! ~ge~
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Jun 14
     
    A new resource site for whistle-blowers. somewhat in the tradition of Wikileaks, but designed for encrypted communications between whistleblowers and journalists.  This one has an impressive board of advisors that includes several names I know and tend to trust, among them former whistle-blowers Daniel Ellsberg, Ray McGovern, Thomas Drake, William Binney, and Ann Wright. Leaked records can only be dropped from a web browser running the Tor anonymizer software and uses the SecureDrop system originally developed by Aaron Schwartz. They strongly recommend using the Tails secure operating system that can be installed to a thumb drive and leaves no tracks on the host machine. https://tails.boum.org/index.en.html Curious, I downloaded Tails and installed it to a virtual machine. It's a heavily customized version of Debian. It has a very nice Gnome desktop and blocks any attempt to connect to an external network by means other than installed software that demands encrypted communications. For example, web sites can only be viewed via the Tor anonymizing proxy network. It does take longer for web pages to load because they are moving over a chain of proxies, but even so it's faster than pages loaded in the dial-up modem days, even for web pages that are loaded with graphics, javascript, and other cruft. E.g., about 2 seconds for New York Times pages. All cookies are treated by default as session cookies so disappear when you close the page or the browser. I love my Linux Mint desktop, but I am thinking hard about switching that box to Tails. I've been looking for methods to send a lot more encrypted stuff down the pipe for NSA to store. Tails looks to make that not only easy, but unavoidable. From what I've gathered so far, if you want to install more software on Tails, it takes about an hour to create a customized version and then update your Tails installation from a new ISO file. Tails has a wonderful odor of having been designed for secure computing. Current
Paul Merrell

Turkish-Uyghur Terror Inc. - America's Other Al Qaeda | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...or-inc-americas-other-al-qaeda

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Gray-Wolves Turkey Uyghur

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Because it relatively poorly understood and under-reported in comparison to other more notorious terrorist groups, the Turkish-Uyghur terror network is perhaps more dangerous and of greater utility to the United States and its allies presently versus their increasingly exposed Al Qaeda legions. The genesis of modern Turkish-sponsored terrorism, like Al Qaeda, also originates from the Cold War. Part of the wider stay-behind networks known as “Gladios” created by NATO to allegedly fight Soviet forces in the event of a Soviet invasion and occupation of Western Europe, these terrorist groups were instead turned against the population of NATO member states and engaged in violence, terrorism, mass murder, and assassinations. A group of ultra-nationalists known as the “Grey Wolves” would be cultivated for this task within Turkey. In a 1998 LA Times article titled, “Turkish Dirty War Revealed, but Papal Shooting Still Obscured,” it would be reported that (emphasis added):
  • In the late 1970s, armed bands of Gray Wolves launched a wave of bomb attacks and shootings that killed hundreds of people, including public officials, journalists, students, lawyers, labor organizers, left-wing activists and ethnic Kurds. During this period, the Gray Wolves operated with encouragement and protection of the Counter-Guerrilla Organization, a section of the Turkish Army’s Special Warfare Department. Working out of the U.S. Military Aid Mission building in Ankara, the Special Warfare Department received funds and training from U.S. advisors to establish “stay behind” squads of civilian irregulars who were set up to engage in acts of sabotage and resistance in the event of a Soviet invasion. Similar Cold War counter-guerrilla units were created in every member state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But instead of preparing for foreign enemies, these operatives often set their sights on domestic targets. Another LA Times piece titled, “Turkey’s Gray Wolves Nip at Heels of Power,” would reveal the extent of the Grey Wolves reign of terror (emphasis added): At the height of the Cold War, the army used the Gray Wolves as a violent counterweight to Turkish Communists. The party’s coffers swelled with secret contributions from the government.  By the late 1970s, the Gray Wolves had spun out of state control. Their paramilitary wing fought a campaign against leftist rivals that killed nearly 6,000 people. Ali Agca, who shot Pope John Paul II in a 1981 assassination attempt, is alleged to have been affiliated with the party.
  • The article would also reveal that despite this horrific past, the Grey Wolves and their political allies were still a very potent political force in Turkey. Today, the Grey Wolves function as a paramilitary wing of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which holds the third largest number of seats in Turkey’s parliament. As troubling as this should be to Turks who may find themselves on the receiving end of a politically powerful terrorist organization apparently tolerated, even sponsored by NATO for decades and in particular, supported by the United States, the Grey Wolves’ terrorism has branched out far beyond Turkey’s borders. NATO Gladio Goes Global  According to a 2009 New American Media report titled, “Behind the China Riots — Oil, Terrorism & ‘Grey Wolves’,” Turkey’s Grey Wolves have established militant training camps as far as China’s western Xinjiang region, helping produce violent terrorists who have carried out a series of deadly attacks across China. The report would state (emphasis added):
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  • Enter the Grey Wolves, one of the world’s most notorious terrorist organizations. Founded in the 1960s, the Wolves are a pan-Turkic paramilitary group with 1 million followers across the Near East, Central Asia and inside Xinjiang. During the decade of political violence in Turkey in the 1980s, the military-backed activists launched a wave of assassinations, massacres of ethnic minorities, and extortions of businesses. By official count, the Turkish government holds the Wolves responsible for more than 600 murders, while leftists estimate the victims numbered in the many thousands.  Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Grey Wolves set up training camps in Central Asia for youths from Turkic language groups, including Uighur. Their indoctrination program embraces the goal of establishing Turan, a Turkish empire across Euro-Asia, subjugating non-Turkish races and unleashing violence to achieve their ends. Out of the limelight, the Wolves provided commando training and material support for the East Turkestan Independence Movement. In essence, NATO’s stay-behind networks had become NATO’s “go-abroad” networks, projecting the same sort of violence, terrorism, and political coercion abroad after the Cold War that these networks carried out domestically during the Cold War.
  • The alleged “struggle” by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, referred to by the terrorists and their foreign sponsors as “East Turkistan,” consists of two essential components – a foreign harbored political front including the Washington D.C. and Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC) and a militant front clearly backed by the US and NATO through intermediary groups like Turkey’s Grey Wolves. Like the Grey Wolves, the World Uyghur Congress is a creation and perpetuation of Western special interests. WUC is directly funded by the US State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) over a quarter of a million dollars (on record) a year. The NED admittedly organizes and underwrites all of WUC’s events, and their annual meetings usually feature almost exclusively US representatives reaffirming their commitment to support WUC’s objectives
  • Looking at a map of China it is clear that this campaign of separatism directly serves the long-standing plans of the United States to encircle and contain China’s rise – a campaign that has been openly and repeated outlined in US policy papers for decades – the most recent of which was published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and was titled, “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China.” It states in no uncertain terms: Because the American effort to ‘integrate’ China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to U.S. primacy in Asia—and could result in a consequential challenge to American power globally—Washington needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy. Encouraging separatism in China’s western Xinjiang region, if successful, would carve off a substantial amount of territory. In conjunction with US-backed separatism in China’s Tibet region, an immense buffer region stands to be created that would virtually isolate China from Central Asia. And while the Grey Wolves and their Uyghur proxies are working hard to create this barrier to China’s west, with their involvement in a recent bombing in Bangkok, it appears the US is now using them to augment efforts to create a similar encirclement across Southeast Asia.
  • The Turkish-Uyghur terror network, in addition to fomenting violence across China, has more recently been trafficking terrorists from Xinjiang, through Southeast Asia, and onward to Turkey where they are staged, armed, trained, and then sent to fight NATO’s proxy war in Syria. This trafficking network apparently snaked its way through Thailand – exposed when Thailand detained over 100 Uyghurs which it then deported upon Beijing’s request back to China in July. On the same day the deportations occurred WUC and NATO’s Grey Wolves organized violent protests in Turkey both in Ankara and at the Thai consulate in Istanbul during which the consulate was invaded and destroyed. A month later, a devastating bomb would detonate in the heart of Bangkok, killing 20 mostly Chinese tourists and injuring over 100 more. In addition to the BBC already being on site before the blast, the British network would conclude even before bodies were cleared from the site that Uyghurs were likely behind the blast. This was done specifically to deflect blame from another US proxy, Thaksin Shinawatra, who has been attempting for years to regain power in Thailand. In reality, Shinawatra and the Uyghur terrorists are both functions of the same Westesrn agenda to encircle and contain China by building up a “wall” of proxy states around Beijing, and if nothing else, to create chaos in which Beijing finds it nearly impossible to prosper.
Paul Merrell

Report: Russia to send marines to Syria - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/d-marines-syria-144713980.html

war & peace Syria Russia U.S. Pipelinestan deployments propaganda Israel neocons

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Two Russian navy ships are completing preparations to sail to Syria with a unit of marines on a mission to protect Russian citizens and the nation's base there, a news report said Monday. The deployment appears to reflect Moscow's growing concern about Syrian President Bashar Assad's future.
  • The Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified Russian navy official as saying that the two amphibious landing vessels, Nikolai Filchenkov and Caesar Kunikov, will be heading shortly to the Syrian port of Tartus, but didn't give a precise date.
  • Each ship is capable of carrying up to 300 marines and a dozen tanks, according to Russian media reports. That would make it the largest known Russian troop deployment to Syria, signaling that Moscow is becoming increasingly uneasy about Syria's slide toward civil war. Interfax also quoted a deputy Russian air force chief as saying that Russia will give the necessary protection to its citizens in Syria. "We must protect our citizens," Maj.-Gen. Vladimir Gradusov was quoted as saying. "We won't abandon the Russians and will evacuate them from the conflict zone, if necessary." Asked whether the air force would provide air support for the navy squadron, Gradusov said they will act on orders.
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  • Asked if the Pentagon is concerned about the plan, officials in Washington said it depends on the mission. They had no comment on the stated goal of protecting Russian citizens and the Russian military position there, something the U.S. would do in a foreign country if in a similar situation. "I think we'd leave it to the Russian Ministry of Defense to speak to their naval movements and their national security decision-making process," said Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, adding that it's not the business of the U.S. Defense Department to "endorse or disapprove of an internal mission like that."
  • What would greatly concern the U.S., he said, is if the Russian naval ships were taking weapons or sending people to support the Assad regime in its crackdown. "The secretary of defense (Leon Panetta) remains concerned about any efforts by external countries or external organizations to supply lethal arms to the Syrian regime so that they can turn around and use those to kill their own people," Kirby said.
  • Ta rtus is Russia's only naval base outside the former Soviet Union, serving Russian navy ships on missions to the Mediterranean and hosting an unspecified number of military personnel.
  • Opposition groups say more than 14,000 people have been killed since the Syrian uprising began in March 2011 with mostly peaceful protests against Assad's autocratic regime. But a ferocious government crackdown led many to take up arms, and the conflict is now an armed insurgency.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 13
     
    The U.S. propaganda effort is in full bloom in this article rife with "Red Menace" Cold War overtones: "'The secretary of defense (Leon Panetta) remains concerned about any efforts by external countries or external organizations to supply lethal arms to the Syrian regime so that they can turn around and use those to kill their own people,' Kirby said." Even as the U.S. has decided to now do openly rather than through its Saudi and Qatari proxies? More than 14,000 killed in Syria since the "uprising" began? The U.N. reported about a week ago that its tool stands at 93,000, up from its previous figure of 80,000. The U.N. numbers are undoubtedly understated. They only count the dead whose names are reported to avoid duplicate counting. The nameless are ignored. "[T]he Syrian uprising began in March 2011 with mostly peaceful protests ..." Syria has been on the Israeli/Neocon hit list for many years as part of Israel's empirical ambitions, which requires destabilizing and  balkanizing surrounding nations. But the Syrian ambitions came to the fore after U.S. deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya wound down and Israel, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia decided they wished to exploit large natural gas deposits in Qatar and off the Israeli coast via a pipeline through Syria to connect with an existing pipeline supplying the E.U. with a terminus in Turkey, all at the expense of an existing Russian monopoly on natural gas sales in the E.U. To boot, Syria is the ally of Iran, which is also on the Israeli hit list.  "[T]he conflict is now an armed insurgency."  Vocabulary please? "An insurgency is an armed rebellion against a constituted authority (for example, an authority recognized as such by the United Nations) when those taking part in the rebellion are not recognized as belligerents." It's not a rebellion; it is a proxy war against Syria being waged mostly by foreign mercenaries and jihadists. An "insurgency" is a military rebellion by citizens of the nation being
Paul Merrell

Syria: US Success Would Only Be the End of the Beginning | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ly-be-the-end-of-the-beginning

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Iran Israel MEK

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • An October 7, 2015 hearing before the US Senate Committee on Armed Forces (SASC) titled, “Iranian Influence in Iraq and the Case of Camp Liberty,” served as a reaffirmation of America’s commitment to back the terrorist organization Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK) and specifically 2,400 members of the organization being harbored on a former US military base in Iraq.
  • Providing testimony was former US Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, former US Marine Corps Commandant and former Supreme Allied Commander Europe General James Jones, USMC (Ret.), and Colonel Wesley Martin, US Army (Ret.). All three witnesses made passionate pleas before a room full of nodding senators for America to continue backing not only MEK terrorists currently harbored on a former US military base in Iraq, but to back groups like MEK inside of Iran itself to threaten the very survival of the government in Tehran. In the opening remarks by Lieberman, he stated: It was not only right and just that we took them off the foreign terrorist organization list, but the truth is now that we ought to be supportive of them and others in opposition to the government in Iran more than we have been.
  • Lieberman would also state (emphasis added): Here’s my point Mr. Chairman, we ought to compartmentalize that agreement also, that nuclear agreement. We ought to put it over there, and not let it stop us from confronting what they’re doing in Syria. Continuing the sanctions for human rights violations in Iran in support of terrorism. And here’s the point I want to make about the National Council of Resistance of Iran and other democratic opposition groups that are Iranian – we ought to be supporting them.  This regime in Tehran is hopeless. It’s not going to change. There’s no evidence … every piece of evidence says the contrary. So I hope we can find a way, we used to do this not so long ago, supporting opposition groups in Iran. They deserve our support, and actually they would constitute a form of pressure on the government in Tehran that would unsettle them as much as anything else we could do because it would threaten the survival of the regime which from every objective indicator I can see is a very unpopular regime in Iran.  The United States, unrepentant regarding the arc of chaos, mass murder, terrorism, civilizational destruction it has created stretching from Libya to Syria, now seeks openly to extend it further into Iran using precisely the same tactics – the use of terrorist proxies – to dismantle and destroy Iranian society.
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  • MEK has carried out decades of brutal terrorist attacks, assassinations, and espionage against the Iranian government and its people, as well as targeting Americans including the attempted kidnapping of US Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, the attempted assassination of USAF Brigadier General Harold Price, the successful assassination of Lieutenant Colonel Louis Lee Hawkins, the double assassinations of Colonel Paul Shaffer and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Turner, and the successful ambush and killing of American Rockwell International employees William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard. Admissions to the deaths of the Rockwell International employees can be found within a report written by former US State Department and Department of Defense official Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. on behalf of the lobbying firm Akin Gump in an attempt to dismiss concerns over MEK’s violent past and how it connects to its current campaign of armed terror – a testament to the depths of depravity from which Washington and London lobbyists operate. To this day MEK terrorists have been carrying out attacks inside of Iran killing political opponents, attacking civilian targets, as well as carrying out the US-Israeli program of targeting and assassinating Iranian scientists. MEK terrorists are also suspected of handling patsies in recent false flag operations carried out in India, Georgia, and Thailand, which have been ham-handedly blamed on the Iranian government.
  • MEK is described by Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Ray Takeyh as a “cult-like organization” with “totalitarian tendencies.” While Takeyh fails to expand on what he meant by “cult-like” and “totalitarian,” an interview with US State Department-run Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty reported that a MEK Camp Ashraf escapee claimed the terrorist organization bans marriage, using radios, the Internet, and holds many members against their will with the threat of death if ever they are caught attempting to escape. Not once is any of this backstory mentioned in the testimony of any of the witnesses before the senate hearing, defiling the memories of those who have been murdered and otherwise victimized by this terrorist organization. The de-listing of MEK in 2012 as a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department is another indictment of the utter lack of principles the US clearly hides behind rather than in any way upholds as a matter of executing foreign policy.
  • MEK has already afforded the US the ability to wage a low-intensity conflict with Iran. MEK’s role in doing so was eagerly discussed in 2009, several years before it was even de-listed as a terrorist organization by the US State Department in the Brooking Institution’s policy paper “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran” (PDF). The report stated (emphasis added): Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S. proxy is the NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran), the political movement established by the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American.
  • In contrast, the group’s champions contend that the movement’s long-standing opposition to the Iranian regime and record of successful attacks on and intelligence-gathering operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support. They also argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group’s supporters in the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering intelligence. The MEK’s greatest intelligence coup was the provision of intelligence in 2002 that led to the discovery of a secret site in Iran for enriching uranium.   Despite its defenders’ claims, the MEK remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group praised the decision to take America hostages and Elaine Sciolino reported that while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks, within the group celebrations were widespread. Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacks—often excused by the MEK’s advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership’s main political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on Iranian civilian and military targets between 1998 and 2001. At the very least, to work more closely with the group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign terrorist organizations.
  • Proof that Brookings’ policy paper was more than a mere theoretical exercise, in 2012 MEK would indeed be de-listed by the US State Department with support for the terrorist organization expanded. The fact that former senators and retired generals representing well-funded corporate think tanks even just this week are plotting to use MEK to overthrow the Iranian government should raise alarms that other criminality conspired within the pages of this policy paper may still well be in play. Lieberman himself suggests that proxy war and regime-change should proceed regardless of the so-called “nuclear deal” – with the 2009 Brookings report itself having stated that (emphasis added): …any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.  Clearly, both Brookings in 2009, and Lieberman this week have conspired to use the so-called “Iranian Nuclear Deal” as cover for betrayal and regime change.
  • For those wondering why Russia has intervened in Syria in the matter that it has, it should be plainly obvious. The US has no intention to stop in Syria. With Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya behind it, and Syria within its clutches, it is clear that Iran is next, and inevitably this global blitzkrieg will not stop until it reaches Moscow and Beijing. Even as the US adamantly denies the obvious – that is has intentionally created and is currently perpetuating Al Qaeda, the so-called “Islamic State,” and other terrorist groups in Syria, it is openly conspiring to use another army of terrorists against neighboring Iran, live before a US Senate hearing. Should the US succeed in Syria, it would not be the end of the conflict, but only the end of the beginning of a much wider world war.
Paul Merrell

West's antiquated unipolar world collides with the East's vision of a mulipolar future.... - 0 views

journal-neo.org/...s-vision-of-a-mulipolar-future

war & peace Ukraine banksters

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • For years the West has been cultivating a proxy political machine inside of Ukraine for the purpose of peeling the nation away from its historical and socioeconomic ties to Russia. The deep relationship between Western corporate-financier interests on Wall Street and in London and the opposition in Ukraine are best summarized in PR Weeks “Analysis: PR gets trodden underfoot as sands shift in Ukraine.” In the article, the involvement of some of the most notorious corporate lobbying firms on Earth, including Bell Pottinger and the Podesta Group, are revealed to have been involved in Ukraine’s internal affairs since the so-called “Orange Revolution” in 2004 – a coup admittedly orchestrated by the West and in particular the US government.  The article chronicles (and defends) the continuing, unabated meddling of the West up to and including the most recent turmoil consuming Ukraine.    PR Week’s article revealed that heavily funded networks propping up the proxy regime in Kiev are sponsored by “individuals and private companies who support stronger EU-Ukraine relations.” It is these Western corporate-financier interests, not Ukrainian aspirations for “democracy” and “freedom,” that kicked off the “Euromaidan” mobs in the first place – and will be the driving force that misshapes and deforms the regions of western Ukraine now overrun by the West’s proxies.  To the east in Ukraine, people are prominently pro-Russian, sharing closer cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic ties to Russia as well as long historical parallels. They have welcomed moves by Russia to counter the coup in Kiev and protect eastern Ukraine from the corrosive influence that will grow as the West further entrenches itself.
  • With the vacant chair of deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych still warm, the tentacles of Western corporate-financier interests have already wound themselves around Kiev and have begun to squeeze.  Chevron, which had signed a multi-billion dollar deal with Ukraine in November, 2013, was operating in the west of Ukraine, and alongside other Western energy giants such as ExxonMobil and Shell. The deals were part of President Yanukovych’s apparent gravitation toward the West and impending integration with the EU which was then suddenly overturned in favor with re-cementing ties with Russia. Western oil giants clearly saw the benefit of backing a putsch that would leave the western half firmly in the orbit of the US, UK, and EU. They can not only continue their business on the western edge of Ukraine, but expand their interests unabated across the country now that a capitulating, puppet regime sits in Kiev.   While Western big-oil plans to move in and siphon billions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is already planning deep cuts in social benefits as part of a staggering austerity regime to restructure financially the seized western region of Ukraine, and if possible, all of Ukraine proper.
  • RT reported in its article, “Pensions in Ukraine to be halved – sequestration draft,” that: The self-proclaimed government in Kiev is reportedly planning to cut pensions by 50 percent as part of unprecedented austerity measures to save Ukraine from default. With an “empty treasury”, reduction of payments might take place in March.  According to the draft document obtained by Kommersant-Ukraine, social payments will be the first to be reduced. The proxy regime set up in Kiev has already indicated its eager acceptance to all IMF conditions. The fate of western Ukraine will be no different than other members of the European Union preyed upon by the corporate-financier interests that created the supranational consolidation in the first place. The reduction of a multipolar Europe into a unipolar, supranational consolidation which can be easily and collectively looted is a microcosm of what the West’s Fortune 500 plan as part of their global unipolar order.  
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  • The natural resources, human capital, and geopolitical advantages found within the borders of Ukraine, will now become the natural resources, human capital, and geopolitical advantages of Chevron, BP, Monsanto, a myriad of defense contractors, telecom corporations, and other familiar brands seen marauding across the planet leaving in its wake destitution, socioeconomic disparity, and perpetual division they intentionally sow in order to protect their holdings from any form of unified or organized opposition.    No matter how obvious the West’s game may be to some, had Ukraine fallen entirely under the control of Western interests, a multitude of excuses could and would have been peddled to explain the unraveling of Ukrainian society in terms that would exonerate the corporate-financier interests truly driving the crisis. But Ukraine has not entirely fallen to the West, and because of that, the planned decimation of western Ukraine, its economy, and its sovereignty will stand out in stark contrast to the eastern region that has remained beyond the West’s reach and within the orbit of Russia’s multipolar vision of the future.  
Paul Merrell

Washington's Quiet Proxy War Against Vietnam | New Eastern Outlook - 0 views

journal-neo.org/...uiet-proxy-war-against-vietnam

war & peace color-revolutions NED Viet-Nam Hong-Kong Thailand Myanmar Malaysia

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • In a rare episode, US meddling has broken the surface recently with complaints across NED’s network of faux human rights advocates and the Western media over the arrest of Nguyen Dinh NgocFirst appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/01/03/washington-s-quiet-proxy-war-against-vietnam/
  • Paul Merrell on 03 Jan 15
     
    Nice round-up of linked articles on NED-sponsored color revolution efforts in ASEAN nations, with a deeper look at activities in Viet Nam.
Paul Merrell

M of A - The "Salafist Principality" - ISIS Paid Off To Leave Mosul, Take Deir Ezzor? - 0 views

www.moonofalabama.org/...ul-and-to-take-deir-ezzor.html

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy ISIL Mosul Deir-Ezzor U.S. Saudis deal

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • On September 20 I wrote about the likely reason for the willful U.S. bombing attack on a critical Syrian army position in Deir Ezzor: Two recent attacks against the Syrian Arab Army in east-Syria point to a U.S. plan to eliminate all Syrian government presence east of Palmyra. This would enable the U.S. and its allies to create a "Sunni entity" in east-Syria and west-Iraq which would be a permanent thorn in side of Syria and its allies. ... The U.S. plan is to eventually take Raqqa by using Turkish or Kurdish proxies. It also plans to let the Iraqi army retake Mosul in Iraq. The only major city in Islamic State territory left between those two is Deir Ezzor. Should IS be able to take it away from the isolated Syrian army garrison it has at least a decent base to survive. (Conveniently there are also rich oil wells nearby.) No one, but the hampered Syrian state, would have an immediate interest to remove it from there. There are new signs that this analysis was correct.
  • Yesterday the Turkish President Erdogan made a remark that points into that direction. As the British journalist Elijah Magnier summarized it: Elijah J. Magnier @EjmAlrai Erdogan: #Turkey will participate in #Mosul just like it did in #Jarablus.Army doesn't take orders from #Iraq PM who should know his limits. 4:06 AM - 11 Oct 2016 "Like Jarablus" was an interesting comparison. The Turks and their proxies took Jarablus in center-north Syria from the Islamic State without any fight and without any casualties from fighting. ISIS had moved away from the city before the Turks walked in. There obviously had been a deal made. That's why I replied this to Magnier's tweet above: Moon of Alabama @MoonofA The Turks will pay off ISIS in Mosul to leave early just like they did in Jarablus? 5:58 AM - 12 Oct 2016
  • Three hours later this rumor from a well connected Syrian historian and journalist in London answered that question: Nizar Nayouf @nizarnayouf Breaking news:Sources in #London say:“#US& #Saudi_Arabia concluded an agreement to let #ISIS leave #Mosul secretly& safely to #Syria"! 9:28 AM - 12 Oct 2016 Erdogan predicts that his troops and proxy forces will march into Mosul just like they marched into Jarablus: In a peaceful walk, without any fight, into a city free of Jihadis. The Saudis and the U.S. arranged for that. The U.S. bombed the most important SAA position in Deir Ezzor so that ISIS, now with the help of its cadres from Mosul, can take over the city. A nice place to keep it holed up in east-Syria until it can further be used in this or that imperial enterprise.
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  • A good plan when your overall aim is to create an obedient mercenary statelet in the center of the Middle East. As the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency wrote in 2012: THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME. But this plan requires to fight the Syrian and Russian air-forces which will do their utmost to defend the SAA group and the 100-200,000 ISIS besieged Syrian civilians in Deir Ezzor. The the U.S. and its allies may be willing to do that. A well known British Tory member of parliament already made noise that British fighter jets should be free to shoot down Russian planes in Syria. The U.S. had claimed that British planes took part in the Deir Ezzor ambush. The defenders of Deir Ezzor lack their own air defenses. The Russian systems at the Syrian west-coast can not reach that far east. The Syrian system are mostly positioned to defend Damascus and other cities from attacks by Israel. Russia recently talked about delivering 10 new Pantsyr-S1 short-to-medium range air defense systems to Syria. At least two of those should be airlifted to Deir Ezzor as soon as possible.
  • UPDATE: I was just made aware of a recent speech by Hizbullah leader Nasrallah who smells the same stinking plot: Sayyed Nasrallah said that the Americans intend to repeat Fallujah plot when they opened a way for ISIL to escape towards eastern Syria before the Iraqi warplanes targeted the terrorists’ convoy, warning that the same deceptive scheme is possible to be carried out in Mosul.
  • All the .mil conspiracy theory folks (me) knew why those ships were sent into the straits. The only thing we couldn't figure out was what kind of false flag the U.S. would use to Tomahawk Yemen because nobody would believe the Houthis would be dumb enough to fire on a U.S. missile cruiser. They hate the U.S., but have no reason to rattle our cage THAT much. They fired on the UAE-contracted Swift because it was bringing armor and weapons to Saudi puppet Hadi's forces in Yemen. Attacking a U.S. missile destroyer accomplishes absolutely nothing for them. When the Houthis heard the USS Mason and Nitze were attacked, they thought it was a joke. They denied any such attack as preposterous, asking the obvious question: "Why the hell would we ever do that? But it gets a little better for us in tinfoil hat land. This post by someone looking for images of deleted Tweets sums it up nicely: https://twitter.com/teddy_cat1/status/786333929309556736 Few hours before Reuter's announcement of a U.S. Navy destroyer came under missile attack off Yemen on Sunday, Saudi official accounts on tweeter like Journalist Fahd Kamely and Saudi-24 News had tweeted that the Royal Saudi Naval Forces targeted what they thought to be an Iranian ship for suspicion of supplying Houthis with weapons! They immediately deleted their tweets following this announcement, but many people have saved a picture for those tweets before being deleted and since then are circulating them on tweeter...
  • So we know the U.S. Navy lied when they said the missiles came from Yemen. The RSNF most likely did launch the missiles and used the 'Iranian arms smuggling' as a cover story in case anyone noticed. The U.S. destroyers were never targeted or in danger, but probably did use the occasion to test their anti-missile defenses. All this set up the false flag, providing Obama and excuse to order the U.S. Navy to Tomahawk the Yemeni coastal radars at the behest of some pissed-off UAE emir (likely a Clinton Foundation donor).
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 16
     
    There are other signs that the U.S. made this slimy deal with the Saudis and that it is being implemented. I'll post other links. And I've seen other confirmation that the UK has authorized its pilots to down Russian aiircraft. Meanwhile, Turkey's Erdogan has commanded that Mosul is to become a Sunni Arab city and has forbidden Shi'ite Militia form participating in the "battle" for Mosul. Today, MSM is full of news about the launch of the Iraqi attack on Mosul. But no mention of the deal to allow ISIL to escape into Syria, of course. Make no mistake: this is the U.S. launching ISIL against Russia, Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah in Syria. With the added bonus of being able to claim that this time, they trained the Iraqi Army correctly, as it walks into Mosul against only token resistance. Smoke and mirrors. This is U.S. war against Russia.
Paul Merrell

FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack | Threat Level | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...freedom-hosting-fbi

surveillance state FBI Tor NSA

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • It wasn’t ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting’s operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It’s not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale. He was denied bail today for the second time since his arrest in July. Freedom Hosting was a provider of turnkey “Tor hidden service” sites — special sites, with addresses ending in .onion, that hide their geographic location behind layers of routing, and can be reached only over the Tor anonymity network. Tor hidden services are used by sites that need to evade surveillance or protect users’ privacy to an extraordinary degree – including human rights groups and journalists. But they also appeal to serious criminal elements, child-pornography traders among them.
  • On August 4, all the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting — some with no connection to child porn — began serving an error message with hidden code embedded in the page. Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn’t respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent J. Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marques behind bars, according to local press reports. Among the many arguments Donahue and an Irish police inspector offered was that Marques might reestablish contact with co-conspirators, and further complicate the FBI probe. In addition to the wrestling match over Freedom Hosting’s servers, Marques allegedly dove for his laptop when the police raided him, in an effort to shut it down.
  • The apparent FBI-malware attack was first noticed on August 4, when all of the hidden service sites hosted by Freedom Hosting began displaying a “Down for Maintenance” message. That included at least some lawful websites, such as the secure email provider TorMail. Some visitors looking at the source code of the maintenance page realized that it included a hidden iframe tag that loaded a mysterious clump of Javascript code from a Verizon Business internet address. By midday, the code was being circulated and dissected all over the net. Mozilla confirmed the code exploited a critical memory management vulnerability in Firefox that was publicly reported on June 25, and is fixed in the latest version of the browser. Though many older revisions of Firefox were vulnerable to that bug, the malware only targeted Firefox 17 ESR, the version of Firefox that forms the basis of the Tor Browser Bundle – the easiest, most user-friendly package for using the Tor anonymity network. That made it clear early on that the attack was focused specifically on de-anonymizing Tor users. Tor Browser Bundle users who installed or manually updated after June 26 were safe from the exploit, according to the Tor Project’s security advisory on the hack.
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  • Perhaps the strongest evidence that the attack was a law enforcement or intelligence operation was the limited functionality of the malware. The heart of the malicious Javascript was a tiny Windows executable hidden in a variable named “Magneto.” A traditional virus would use that executable to download and install a full-featured backdoor, so the hacker could come in later and steal passwords, enlist the computer in a DDoS botnet, and generally do all the other nasty things that happen to a hacked Windows box. But the Magneto code didn’t download anything. It looked up the victim’s MAC address — a unique hardware identifier for the computer’s network or Wi-Fi card — and the victim’s Windows hostname. Then it sent it to a server in Northern Virginia server, bypassing Tor, to expose the user’s real IP address, coding the transmission as a standard HTTP web request.
  • The official IP allocation records maintained by the American Registry for Internet Numbers show the two Magneto-related IP addresses were part of a ghost block of eight addresses that have no organization listed. Those addresses trace no further than the Verizon Business data center in Ashburn, Virginia, 20 miles northwest of the Capital Beltway. The code’s behavior, and the command-and-control server’s Virginia placement, is also consistent with what’s known about the FBI’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, the law enforcement spyware first reported by WIRED in 2007. Court documents and FBI files released under the FOIA have described the CIPAV as software the FBI can deliver through a browser exploit to gather information from the target’s machine and send it to an FBI server in Virginia. The FBI has been using the CIPAV since 2002 against hackers, online sexual predators, extortionists, and others, primarily to identify suspects who are disguising their location using proxy servers or anonymity services, like Tor. Prior to the Freedom Hosting attack, the code had been used sparingly, which kept it from leaking out and being analyzed.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 13
     
    Taking down the entire Freedom Hosting service because some content was kiddie porn is reminiscent of the U.S. government's proxy take-down of Mega-Upload in New Zealand. Such actions that disable legitimate users or deny access to their data are in my opinion violative of the 1st and 4th Amendments.  It suppresses the Freedom of Speech and seizes more than the 4th Amendment allows.  That our own government would use malware for surveillance purposes under any circumstance is just plain chilling.
Paul Merrell

Land Destroyer: America's Covert Re-Invasion of Iraq - 0 views

landdestroyer.blogspot.mx/...overt-re-invasion-of-iraq.html

war & peace ISIL U.S.-foreign-policy war by proxy

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • mage: ISIS clearly did not materialize spontaneously within Iraq, it hasclearly redeployed from its NATO-sponsored destruction of Syria to northern Iraq, perhaps in an attempt to justify a NATO incursion and thecreation of a buffer zone straddling Syrian, Iraqi, and even possibly Iranian territory with the goal of targeting Iran directly with ISIS.   June 13, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci - LD) - Heavily armed, well funded, and organized as a professional, standing army, the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) swept southward into Iraq from Turkey and northeastern Syria, taking the cities of Mosul and Tikrit, and now threaten the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad itself. The United States was sure to prop up two unfounded narratives - the first being that US intelligence agencies, despite assets in Iraq and above it in the form of surveillance drones, failed to give warning of the invasion, and that ISIS is some sort of self-sustaining terror organization carving out a "state" by "robbing banks" and collecting "donations" on Twitter. The Wall Street Journal in its report, "Iraqi Drama Catches U.S. Off Guard," stated: The quickly unfolding drama prompted a White House meeting Wednesday of top policy makers and military leaders who were caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces, officials acknowledged.
  • mage: ISIS has convoys of brand new matching Toyota's the samevehicles seen among admittedly NATO-armed terrorists operatingeverywhere from Libya to Syria, and now Iraq. It is a synthetic, state-sponsored regional mercenary expeditionary force.
  • The question remains, if a Lebanese newspaper knew ISIS was on the move eastward, why didn't the CIA? The obvious answer is the CIA did know, and is simply feigning ignorance at the expense of their reputation to bait its enemies into suspecting the agency of  incompetency rather than complicity in the horrific terroristic swath ISIS is now carving through northern Iraq. Described extensively in the full New Eastern Outlook Journal (NEO) report, "NATO’s Terror Hordes in Iraq a Pretext for Syria Invasion," the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, have funded and armed terrorists operating in Syria for the past 3 years to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars - coincidentally the same amount that ISIS would require to gain primacy among militant groups fighting in Syria and to mobilize forces capable of crossing into Iraq and overwhelming Baghdad's national defenses.
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  • a 3-year ongoing CIA program (here, here, and here) all along the Turkish-Syrian border to "monitor" and "arm" "moderate" militants fighting the Syrian government, the US claims it was caught "by surprise." If drones and CIA operatives operating in ISIS territory weren't enough to detect the impending invasion, perhaps the CIA should have just picked up a newspaper.Indeed, the Lebanon Daily Start in March 2014 reported that ISIS openly withdrew its forces from Latakia and Idlib provinces in western Syria, and redeployed them in Syria's east - along the Syrian-Iraqi border. The article titled, "Al-Qaeda splinter group in Syria leaves two provinces: activists," stated explicitly that: On Friday, ISIS – which alienated many rebels by seizing territory and killing rival commanders – finished withdrawing from the Idlib and Latakia provinces and moved its forces toward the eastern Raqqa province and the eastern outskirts of the northern city of Aleppo, activists said.
  • The NEO report includes links to the US Army’s West Point Countering Terrorism Center reports, “Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleedout: al-Qa’ida’s Road In and Out of Iraq,” and “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq,” which detail extensively the terror network used to flood Iraq with foreign terrorists, weapons, and cash to fuel an artificial "sectarian war" during the US occupation, and then turned over to flood Syria with terrorists in the West's bid to overthrow the government in Damascus. What's ISIS Doing in Iraq? The NEO report would also post Seymour Hersh's 2007 article, "The Redirection," documenting over the course of 9 pages US, Saudi, and Israeli intentions to create and deploy sectarian extremists region-wide to confront Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hersh would note that these "sectarian extremists" were either tied to Al Qaeda, or Al Qaeda itself. The ISIS army moving toward Baghdad is the final manifestation of this conspiracy, a standing army operating with impunity, threatening to topple the Syrian government, purge pro-Iranian forces in Iraq, and even threatening Iran itself by building a bridge from Al Qaeda's NATO safe havens in Turkey, across northern Iraq, and up to Iran's borders directly. Labeled "terrorists" by the West, grants the West plausible deniability in its creation, deployment, and across the broad spectrum of atrocities it is now carrying out.  
  • It is a defacto re-invasion of Iraq by Western interests - but this time without Western forces directly participating - rather a proxy force the West is desperately attempting to disavow any knowledge of or any connection to. However, no other explanation can account for the size and prowess of ISIS beyond state sponsorship. And since ISIS is the clear benefactor of state sponsorship, the question is, which states are sponsoring it? With Iraq, Syria, and Iran along with Lebanese-based Hezbollah locked in armed struggle with ISIS and other Al Qaeda franchises across the region, the only blocs left are NATO and the GCC (Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular).
  • With the West declaring ISIS fully villainous in an attempt to intervene more directly in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, creating a long desired "buffer zone" within which to harbor, arm, and fund an even larger terrorist expeditionary force, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and others are offered an opportunity to preempt Western involvement and to crush the ISIS - cornering and eliminating NATO-GCC's expeditionary force while scoring geopolitical points of vanquishing Washington's latest "villain." Joint Iraq-Iranian operations in the north and south of ISIS's locations, and just along Turkey's borders could envelop and trap ISIS to then be whittled down and destroyed - just as Syria has been doing to NATO's proxy terrorist forces within its own borders.Whatever the regional outcome may be, the fact is the West has re-invaded Iraq, with a force as brutal, if not worse than the "shock and awe" doctrine of 2003. Iraq faces another difficult occupation if it cannot summon a response from within, and among its allies abroad, to counter and crush this threat with utmost expediency.
Paul Merrell

What America will offer Israel after the nuclear deal | Jewish Telegraphic Agency - 0 views

www.jta.org/...-israel-after-the-nuclear-deal

war & peace Iranian-nukes-myth deal American-Foreign-Policy Israel-reward

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The moment the Iran nuclear deal becomes law, as seems increasingly likely given growing congressional support for the agreement, the focus of the U.S.-Israel conversation will shift to the question of what’s next. What more will Washington do to mitigate the Iranian threat and reassure Israel and other regional allies? For starters, President Barack Obama seems ready to offer an array of security enhancements. Among them are accelerating and increasing defense assistance to Israel over the next decade; increasing the U.S. military presence in the Middle East; stepping up the enforcement of non-nuclear related Iran sanctions; enhancing U.S. interdiction against disruptive Iranian activity in the region; and increasing cooperation on missile defense.
  • Obama in an interview Monday with the Forward attached urgency to confronting Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies. Speaking of Israel, he said, “We can do even more to enhance the unprecedented military and intelligence cooperation that we have with them, and to see, are there additional capabilities that Israel may be able to use to prevent Hezbollah, for example, from getting missiles.” The emphasis on Hezbollah was appropriate, said Uzi Arad, Netanyahu’s national security adviser from 2009 to 2011. “The president on sensing a degree of urgency with Hezbollah sooner rather than later is absolutely right,” Arad said, noting the group’s role as an Iranian proxy in helping prop up the Assad regime in Syria. “It relates to the need to uproot and to neutralize the violent and anti-American and anti-Israel radical group. It is a matter of urgent joint concern.” Arad outlined a number of areas that would enhance Israel’s sense of security in a post-deal environment, including:
  • Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not wanting to be seen as endorsing the deal while there’s still a chance Congress could scuttle it, has directed Israeli officials not to engage with U.S. officials on what could be done after the deal is in place. The Israeli envoy to Washington, Ron Dermer, has said that Israel would be ready for discussions only after options to kill the agreement formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action are exhausted.
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  • Congress has until Sept. 17 to decide whether to allow the deal to proceed. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is leading the opposition to the deal, argued in a memo distributed Monday that U.S. pledges of post-deal security enhancements are inadequate.
  • There also will be an emphasis on keeping any of the tens of billions of dollars to which Iran will gain unfettered access through the sanctions relief from reaching Iran’s proxies.
  • * Maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region, even as the United States enhances the military capabilities of Arab Persian Gulf allies that, similar to Israel, will be seeking reassurances in the wake of the Iran deal; * Enhancing joint missile defense programs; * Extending the defense assistance memorandum of understanding, which since 2008 has provided Israel with an average of $3 billion in defense assistance per year, for another 10 years (it’s set to expire in 2018), and delivering promised F-35 advanced fighter aircraft to Israel; * Enhancing joint civilian scientific research and development; * Delivering advanced bunker-buster bombs to maintain Israel’s deterrent edge should Iran cheat on or abandon the deal. “Israel should be given this special kind of ordnance so it could have a more effective military option in case of Iranian violations of the agreement,” Arad said, arguing that this would strengthen the agreement by creating a disincentive for Iran to cheat. *A “declaratory” component emphasizing U.S. longstanding commitments to Israel.
  • * Making clear that the U.S. effort to stop the expansion of Islamist terrorism and extremism targets Iranian activities as well as those associated with the Islamic State terrorist group.
  • Obama touched on many of these issues in a letter he sent to Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., on Aug. 19. “It is imperative that, even as we effectively cut off Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon through the implementation of the JCPOA, we take steps to ensure that we and our allies and our partners are more capable than ever to deal with Iran’s destabilizing activities and support for terrorism,” Obama said in the letter, which was first obtained by The New York Times. The president specified four areas where cooperation would be enhanced: extending defense assistance for a decade, joint missile defense research, joint efforts to improve tunnel detection (following the advances made by Hamas in its 2014 war with Israel), and “strengthening our efforts to confront conventional and asymmetric threats.” The letter persuaded Nadler to back the deal and should be a salve to Israeli security officials, said Dan Arbell, a former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Washington.
  • Persian Gulf allies would want the reassurances that Israel is receiving as well as specific assurances of assistance in keeping Iran from meddling in Arab affairs, said Michael Eisenstadt, a longtime officer in the U.S. Army Reserve who served in the Middle East. Even with such assurances, Eisenstadt said, Gulf allies would remain concerned that the deal enhances Iran’s stature. “Weapons are Band-Aids on a hemorrhage,” said Eisenstadt, now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “From the point of view of our allies in the region, we’ve contributed to a lot of the problem” by advancing the Iran deal.
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