It appears the Obama administration and their Turkish, Saudi and Qatari allies are losing the covert war in Syria. If so, this explains why the President and US and British media are once again trying to ramp up momentum for military intervention against the Assad regime.

The following video from AMTV examines the evidence that Assad loyalists are gaining ground against widely disunited Syrian opposition.

Anchor Topher Morrison summarizes evidence that government forces have successfully cut the rebels’ weapons supply line from Turkey. This, in turn, has forced them to fall on more primitive terrorist tactics, such as recent bombings in Damascus.

For awhile there was speculation that Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Moscow signaled a possible relaxation in Russia’s opposition to military intervention. This ceased after the Russian government arrested (during Kerry’s visit) a US State Department official for spying for the CIA.

photo credit: FreedomHouse via photopin cc

Breaking News: According to the Daily Mail, it now appears Russia’s CIA spy bust was linked to Boston Bombing. Click here:

Russia’s CIA spy bust ‘linked to Boston bombing’

Ambassador Stevens

What Really Happened in Benghazi?

Americans (at least the ones who know where Libya is) are understandably confused and angry about the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack that killed US ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi. If they are looking to the current congressional hearings to clarify what really happened, they will be greatly disappointed.

Despite accusations by Republican leaders that Obama committed has treason and is trying to cover it up, they have no more interest than Democrats in bringing out the truth. No one wants the dirty little secret coming out that Stevens was involved in a covert CIA operation to funnel Libyan weapons and jihadists to Syria to fight the Assad regime.

The funding, arming and training of Al Qaeda terrorists for geopolitical ends is a well-established pillar of US foreign policy. (National Counterterrorism Center Report on Terrorism 2011). This isn’t a partisan issue, as CIA support for jihad has received equal levels of support from both Obama and his predecessor George W Bush.

The Road to Damascus Starts in Benghazi

The May 9^th Washington’s Blog provides a comprehensive summary of the factual details about September 2012 that have come out over the past eight months. Numerous official and mainstream sources confirm that Benghazi is a long time stronghold of Al Qaeda terrorists, who transferred their focus to Syria and the Assad regime after Gaddafi was overthrown. For example (specific sources shown in parentheses):

• The US-supported opposition which overthrew Libyan president Muammar Gadaffi was largely comprised of Al Qaeda terrorists (Telegraph interview with Libyan rebel commander).
• According to a 2007 report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center’s center, the Libyan city of Benghazi was one of Al Qaeda’s main headquarters and sent Al Qaeda fighters into Iraq prior to Gaddafi’s overthrow (West Point military academy).
• Al Qaeda is now largely in control of Libya, and the Libyan Provisional Government immediately ran up Al Qaeda flags at the Benghazi courthouse (the seat of their new government) after Gaddafi was overthrown (Daily Mail).
• Gaddafi, who always maintained Benghazi was an Al Qaeda stronghold, was on the verge of invading the city in 2011. However NATO planes stopped him, and protected Benghazi (Telegraph correspondent in Benghazi).
• CNN, the Telegraph, the Washington Times and many other mainstream sources confirm that since Gaddafi’s overthrow, Al Qaeda terrorists from Libya have been flooding into Syria to fight the Assad regime.
• Mainstream sources, such as the New York Times also confirm the Syrian opposition is largely comprised of Al Qaeda terrorists.
• Despite claims to the contrary, The U.S. has been arming the Syrian opposition since 2006. (Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post, CBC News).
• The post-Gaddafi Libyan government is also a top funder and arms supplier of the Syrian opposition. (Washington Post, Telegraph correspondent in Istanbul).

Was Stevens Running the Operation?

Mounting evidence suggests Stevens was assigned to run the covert CIA operation to funnel Libyan arms and jihadists to Syria via Turkey:

•  In 2011, Stevens was appointed to be the Obama administration’s liaison with the “budding Libyan opposition” (ABC News).

• Stevens and the State Department worked directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who has direct connections with Al Qaeda (Russia Today).
• The Wall Street Journal, Telegraph and other sources confirm that the US consulate (which wasn’t really a consulate but a “State Department Special Mission Compound”) in Benghazi was mainly being used for a secret CIA operation.
• Retired Lt. General William Boykin, former US Special Forces Commander and deputy defense undersecretary for intelligence (who worked with the CIA in the 1990s), stated in a January interview that it’s a “reasonable supposition” that Stevens was in Benghazi as part of an effort to arm the Syrian opposition. He draws this conclusion based on 1) the directive Stevens was given to support the Syrian rebels, 2) the logical assumption the Special Mission Compound would be the hub of that activity and 3) the absence lack of any other logical explanation for Stevens’ sudden reappearance in Benghazi on September 10, 2012 after a year’s absence. (CNS News)
• Egyptian security officials and US intelligence sources have confirmed Boykin’s hypothesis (WND Politics, CNBC)

Why Was Stevens Murdered?

 I have yet to see a plausible explanation anywhere for the terrorist attack on the Special Mission Compound or Stevens’ murder. Perhaps a genuine congressional investigation – in place of the soap operate we saw last week – could come up with some genuine leads. However so long as Congress refuses to examine the covert operation angle, they are unlikely to add much to what we already know.

I agree with Boykin that the Obama administration and Congress need to come clean, without necessarily revealing details, that Stevens was involved in a covert operation. The main problem (besides being illegal and morally bankrupt and undermining US standing internationally) with the existing US policy of covertly funding and arming jihadists is that it isn’t secret any more. This continuing duplicity on the part of the Obama administration and Congress only further undermines Americans’ confidence in government, as well as the major respect the United States used to enjoy abroad.

photo credit: Steve Rhodes via photopin cc

Reposted from Veterans Today

Below is an excellent 60 minute interview with FBI translator and whistle blower Sibel Edmonds.

In it she provides extensive background on the cold war CIA/NATO Gladio Operation, which apparently never ended in Turkey and the Caucasus. This background is essential in understanding how the CIA came to fund Islamic jihadists in the breakaway republic of Georgia and the turbulent Russian regions of Chechnya and Dagestan. This, in turn, is essential in understanding how Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev came to attend a CIA-funded Jamestown Foundation workshop in Dagestan.

Edmonds stresses that additional factual evidence is necessary to connect all the dots. However she poses an interesting hypothesis linking the Boston bombing with a recent switch in CIA attitudes towards Chechen separatists (they are suddenly being referred to as terrorists rather than freedom fighters). She believes this, in turn, may possibly relate to a convoluted scheme to pressure Russia to agree to a NATO invasion of Syria.

Enjoy.

photo credit: liquidnight via photopin cc

Originally posted at Daily Censored

According to Reuters, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales celebrated International Workers Day (May 1) by expelling the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Mr Morales accused the agency, which operates under State Department auspices, of seeking to “conspire against” the Bolivian people and his government. USAID has been working in Bolivia for almost five decades. According to its website, it dedicated $52.1 million to Bolivia in 2010 .

On previous May Days, Mr Morales announced the nationalization of key industries, such as hydroelectric power and the electricity grid. This year he announced he “would only nationalize the dignity of the Bolivian people”. Speaking at a rally in La Paz, the president said there was “no lack of US institutions which continue to conspire against our people and especially the national government, which is why we’re going to take the opportunity to announce on this May Day that we’ve decided to expel USAID”.

Morales explained the expulsion was in protest to a recent remark by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who referred to Latin America as “the backyard of the United States”. The term evokes strong emotions in the region, which experienced several U.S.-backed coups during the Cold War. The Bolivian leader has threatened USAID with expulsion in the past, asserting that its programs have “political rather than social” ends. He has also accused it of “manipulating” and “using” union leaders.

USAID’s Unsavory Past

I and other veterans of the 1980s Central American solidarity movement are only too aware of USAID’s unsavory past. Its reputation of being used as cover, like many US embassies, for the CIA and other US intelligence agencies, was in large part responsible for President Putin’s decision to expel USAID from Russia last fall.* Many older activists vividly recall USAID’s heavy hand in suppressing domestic opposition (by destabilizing human rights and labor initiatives, meddling in local elections and  collaborating with right wing coups to overturn democratic elections) to US military intervention in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua and maintaining South American dictatorships friendly to US corporate interests.

Bolivian present criticisms of USAID are far more nuanced. The main complaint seems to be that the US agency contrasts unfavorably with European development programs, which are totally open and transparent and consistently consult and collaborate with the Bolivian government. USAID differs significantly in its heavy reliance on private contractors and drug eradication (which is controversial among Bolivian farmers and a low priority for the government), who rarely collaborate with local officials and are generally extremely secretive about their activities.

Mr Morales, who heads his country’s union of coca growers, has also been critical in the past of US counter-narcotic programmes in Bolivia, repeatedly stating that the fight against drugs is driven by geopolitical interests.

In 2008, Mr Morales expelled the US ambassador and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for allegedly conspiring against his government.

The State Department Response

US state department spokesman Patrick Ventrell rejected the allegations as “baseless and unfounded”. He added “We think the programs have been positive for the Bolivian people, and fully coordinated with the Bolivian government and appropriate agencies under their own national development plan.”

A prepared statement from USAID further read: “Those who will be most hurt by the Bolivian government’s decision are the Bolivian citizens who have benefited from our collaborative work on education, agriculture, health, alternative development, and the environment.”

Evo Morales became Bolivia’s first socialist and indigenous president in 2005. He was re-elected by a landslide in 2009,

*I was interviewed by Voice of Russia radio at the time of the Russian move to expel USAID. The transcripts unfortunately are in pigeon English, with Parts I and II on two separate sites. For this reason, I also include a link to the audio file of the entire interview:

http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_10_16/USAID-CIA-supporting-dictators-and-stifling-democracy-exclusive-interview/

http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/thread-803039-1-1.html

Download audio file

photo credit: Alain Bachellier via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

According to Daniel Hopsicker in MadCow Morning News, it turns out Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the two alleged Boston bombers, was married to the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller. Uncle Ruslan, in turn, had a decade-long business relationship with Halliburton, the oil company/defense contractor formerly run by Dick Cheney that awarded billions of dollars in no-bid contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Back in the nineties, Tsarni served for two years as a “consultant” for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. It’s been well-documented that USAID (which is funded by the US State Department) is often used as a front for CIA and other US intelligence operations.

In the early 1990s Ruslan Tsarni married the daughter of former top CIA Graham Fuller, who spent 20 years as operations officer in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong. In 1982 Fuller was appointed the National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia at the CIA, and in 1986, under Ronald Reagan, he became the Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, with overall responsibility for national level strategic forecasting.

At the time of their marriage, Ruslan Tsarni was known as Ruslan Tsarnaev, the same last name as his nephews Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged bombers.

It is unknown when he changed his last name to Tsarni.

Coincidentally Graham Fuller is listed as one of the American Deep State rogues on FBI translator whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery. According to Edmonds, the gallery features subjects of FBI investigations she became aware of during her time as an FBI translator.

She asserts that these individuals engaged in criminal activities subsequently protected under the doctrine of State Secrets. After Attorney General John Ashcroft went all the way to the Supreme Court to silence her, she posted the twenty-one photos to the Internet with no names.

One photo has been subsequently identified as Graham Fuller.

All this is just the tip of the iceberg. Read full post here: MadCow Morning News

photo credit: ford via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast published a fascinating article in Vice Magazine this week (Nicolas Maduro Did Not Steal the Venezuelan Election) about being hired by Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in 2004 to investigate the possibility the US might tamper with Venezuela’s elections (following Palast’s 2001 expose detailing how Florida governor Jeb Bush stole the election for his brother).

The article describes how he presented Chavez and Maduro with a collection of secret FBI memos revealing that ChoicePoint Corp – under a no-bid contract (from the US government) – had “shoplifted” Venezuela’s voter rolls, as well as the voter rolls of Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico and Honduras, all of whom were on the verge of electing presidents from the political left.

By coincidence it was a subsidiary of ChoicePoint Jeb Bush engaged in 2000 to illegally “purge” more than 56,000 voters, the vast majority black and poor, from Florida’s voter rolls. A maneuver which would ultimately give George Bush the US presidency by just 537 ballots.

After reading Palast’s report, Chavez moved swiftly to establish a virtually tamper-proof electoral system. In Venezuela every voter gets TWO ballots. One is electronic; the second is a paper print-out of the touch-screen ballot, which the voter reviews, authorizes and places in a locked ballot-box. Fifty-four percent of the boxes are opened at random and checked against the computer tally – making the system virtually tamper proof.

When Maduro’s opponent Henrique Capriles officially challenged the recent outcome, he was allowed to add as many precincts as he wanted (12,000) to this automatic audit.

It would appear the US State Department doesn’t have a leg to stand on in backing opposition claims that Maduro’s win is fraudulent. Thus, according to Palast, they have turned to another old CIA trick, violent street demonstrations protesting the electoral outcome. He points out that most, but not all, of the voters killed in street protests are Chavistas.

photo credit: sterno_inferno via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

Retired General William G Boykin believes when he was assassinated in Benghazi, former ambassador Chris Stevens was working for the CIA running guns (or preparing to run them), via Turkey, to the  Syrian rebels. He explains his reasoning in an interview with CNSNews.com.

Boykin is the former commander of the U.S. Special Forces Command and the former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, In the 1990s worked directly with the CIA.

As he reveals in the interview, he’s highly critical of Obama’s decision to support the Islamist groups fighting to overthrow the Assad regime

photo credit: Steve Rhodes via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

Sakine Cansiz

Somehow I find myself on the mailing list of the PKK (the Kurdish Workers Party), which is engaged in armed struggle against Turkey for an autonomous Kurdistan and cultural and political rights for all Turkish Kurds. According to Wikipedia, international human rights groups document decades of human rights abuses against the Kurds. In addition to criminalizing the Kurdish language, the Turkish government has deliberated destroyed 4,000 Kurdish villages and forcibly evacuated a million Kurdish civilians from their homes. This is in addition to the execution of 18,000 Kurds and the imprisonment of more than 119,000. Because Turkey is an ally, the US and the EU oppose the Kurds having an independent or semi-autonomous state and brand the PKK as a terrorist organization.

The newsletter is called Koma Civiken Kurdistan Info (in English Peoples’ Confederation of Kurdistan-Info). Founded in the early seventies, the PKK has backed away from its original Marxist-Leninist orientation (at least according to Wikipedia). However it’s the first newsletter I have read in more than two decades that still refers to it members as “comrade.” This makes me nostalgic for the old days. I suspect this is why I continue to subscribe.

I confess I don’t even open the newsletters most weeks. Following the assassination of three (female) PKK leaders in Paris last week, I read every single word of one I got on Sunday. For people who may have missed this story in the corporate media, this was a classic Mossad-style execution in which the killers got through an electronic lock system (requiring a code to get in) at the Kurdish Information Center. All three women died of three or four gunshot wounds to the head. The executions have occurred in the context of secret peace negotiations between the PKK leadership and the Turkish government. The day before the killing, rumors began to circulate that the PKK and the Erdogan government had agreed on a peace plan. The PKK has massive groups of followers in Europe, primarily in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. However according to the AL Monitor, this was the first PKK assassination carried out on French soil.

The Kurdish Rosa Luxemburg

Sakine Cansiz, one of the co-founders of the PKK, was the most prominent of the three. She organized the prison resistance movement during the decade she spent in prison in the 1980s. The fact that half of the PKK armed resistance are women is credited to Cansiz, often referred to as the Kurdish Rosa Luxemburg.

Is the Mossad Responsible for the PKK Executions?

Here in New Zealand we know all about the Mossad’s ruthless international assassinations (they will go anywhere and kill anyone to further Israeli Zionism). The Mossad was front page new in 2010 after our government discovered Israeli spies had used forged New Zealand passports to assassinate a Hamas leader in Dubai. Six months later, another suspected Mossad agent was discovered to have five passports on his person when he was killed in the Christchurch earthquake.

C. Tuttle, writing in Firedoglake also puts the Mossad high on the list of likely culprits. He refers to a November AL Monitor article by Sedat Laciner revealing that Israeli intelligence monitors PKK training camps continuously via drones, satellites and other electronic. John Robles, writing in The Voice of Russia, believes that Israeli or US intelligence, both eager for a pretext to invade Syria and/or Iran, would have an equally strong incentive to derail a PKK-Turkish peace settlement. Like Iraq, Syria and Iran have large semi-autonomous Kurdish regions, which the PKK uses as a base for military operations against Turkey. Robles reminds us that Turkey recently authorized military incursions into Iran, supposedly to seek out and attack PKK militants. It’s easy to see the US or Israel using the threat posed by Kurdish “terrorism” as an excuse to put boots on the ground in either or both countries.

The PKK Blames Turkish Gladio

In their most recent newsletter, the PKK agrees that the assassinations were an effort to derail the peace negations. However they hold the Turkish Gladio responsible. This is a shorthand reference to Counter-Guerrilla, the Turkish branch of the CIA’s infamous Gladio program. This is a clandestine US-backed force formed in France, Italy, Greece, Turkey and other countries with strong communist sympathies after World War II.

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Cross posted at Daily Censored

John Kiriakou

Another excellent reason not to vote for Obama relates to his refusal to prosecute any CIA or Pentagon military involved in torture at Guantanamo, Iraqi and Afghan prisons or secret CIA prisons in countries where torture is legal. This is despite a review of 101 torture cases begun in 2007 under George W. Bush and two full criminal investigations of torture victims who died under interrogation. Ironically the only person to be arrested in the whole torture scandal is the former CIA analyst who was the first to publicly confirm that the CIA was engaging in “water boarding” of al Qaeda detainees.

In late 2007, John Kiriakou*, an ex-CIA analyst (1998-2004), became a sought-after media personality after he described the Agency’s use of waterboarding on ABC News. His initial stance on waterboarding was that “it worked” in preventing future terrorist attacks.

The government originally charged Kiriakou under the Espionage Act, but dropped these charges after he agreed to plead guilty to “outing” a CIA torturer named Thomas Donahue Fletcher. Fletcher was the chief of the Headquarters Based Rendition Group and was personally responsible for the rendition of a number of high value detainees to a CIA black site in Thailand, where he witnessed and played a role in their torture. Although Kiriakou never disclosed Fletcher’s name publicly, he allegedly confirmed his identity in an email to Matthew Cole, formerly of ABC News.

All this despite a claim by an anonymous government official that Fletcher’s identity was already known by at least 10 human rights activists before his alleged “outing” by Kiriakou. Moreover, given that Fletcher had retired from active service,  it’s hard to argue that Kiriakou’s confirmation of his identity jeopardized on-going CIA intelligence operations in any way. Especially as the operations Fletcher oversaw violated both US and international law.

As part of his plea bargain, Kiriakou will receive a six year sentence in January, of which he will serve 2 ½ years. Read more here.

The Greek Government Takes a Page From Obama

Kostas Vaxevanis

Meanwhile Greek authorities have arrested magazine editor Kostas Vaxevanis for publishing the names of 2,000+ tax avoiding Greeks alleged to have Swiss bank accounts. The list includes numerous prominent members of Greece’s political and business elite. Police officials claim that Vaxevanis illegally published personal details without proof that the people named had broken the law. However Vaxevanis and other government critics portray his arrest as part of a cover-up intended to obscure claims that the finance minister has had the list in his possession for more than two years without acting on it.

The case has triggered a parliamentary inquiry and could result in the prosecution of major government figures, during a period where systematic tax evasion by the Greek elite has necessitated painful austerity cuts for Greece’s middle and lower classes – which, in turn, has triggered massive political unrest. Read more here here,

***

*Who is John Kiriakou: After resigning from the CIA in 2004, Kiriakou, author of The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror, worked as an intelligence/security consultant in the private sector, as well as serving as a counter-terrorism consultant for ABC News. After John Kerry (D-MA) assumed the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, Kiriakou became the Committee’s senior investigator until 2011, when he became managing partner of Rhodes Global Consulting, an Arlington, Virginia-based political risk analysis firm.

Mail Online photo

According to the British Mail Online, Pakistani human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar has filed two separate court cases intended to trigger a formal murder investigation into the roles of two US officials responsible for ordering drone strikes which killed teachers, students and policemen in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The officials are Jonathan Banks, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Islamabad station, and John A. Rizzo, the CIA’s former chief lawyer. Rizzo is named because of an interview he gave after he retired as CIA General Counsel last year. In it, he boasts that he personally authorized every drone strike in which America’s enemies were ‘hunted down and blown to bits’.

The first case which has already been heard by a court in Islamabad and judgment is expected imminently. If the judge grants Akbar’s petition, an international arrest warrant will be issued via Interpol against the  two Americans.

The second case is being heard in the city of Peshawar. In it, Akbar and the families of civilian drone victims civilians are seeking a ruling that further strikes in Pakistani airspace should be viewed as ‘acts of war’. For this reason, they argue that the Pakistan Air Force should try to shoot down the drones and that the government should sever diplomatic relations with the US and launch murder inquiries against those responsible.

According to a report last month by academics at Stanford and New York universities, between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed since Pakistan drone strikes began in 2004. According to the report, up to  881 were civilians, including 176  children. Only 41 people who were killed were confirmed as ‘high-value’ terrorist targets.

Read more here: CIA Chiefs Face Arrest

***

To provide some historical context, I have embedded the 1998 documentary about five brave whistleblowers (Ralph McGhehee, Verne Lyon, Mary Embree and Phillip Agee), who left the Agency owing to disgust with CIA policies involving the torture and assassination of innocent civilians and subsequently went public. Agee, especially, experienced major retaliation for writing about his past CIA work. Roetinger’s account is most interesting, as he was in charge of organizing the coup in Guatemala that removed democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz from the presidency. The manner in which Roetinger was recruited is extremely comical. This CIA officer comes to the door, refuses to identify himself and tells him they want him to overthrow an unnamed government in Latin America.

YouTube video is in 6 parts. Full video can also be seen at http://www.personalgrowthcourses.net/video/secrets_cia