Tony Cartalucci

Activist Post

Reports indicate that a gunman dressed in Al Qaeda or “Islamic State” (ISIS) attire has taken hostages in a cafe in the Australian city of Sydney. Demands made by the gunman include being allowed to contact Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and bringing him the Al Qaeda/ISIS flag.

Image: Serving no purpose besides giving the West increased justification for executing total war against Syria and then Iran as it has desperately sought for years, the latest “terror attack” in Australia unfolds amid a community with infiltrated mosques filled with eager supporters of America’s proxy war on Damascus.

The latest incident should be examined in the context of ISIS’ genesis and the source of its ability to seemingly menace the entire planet with violence and acts of terrorism with seemingly inexhaustible resources.

The United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and several other European and Middle Eastern partners openly conspired to use Al Qaeda as a regional mercenary force in a proxy war against Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah in Lebanon as far back as 2007. Having then materialized this force in 2011 and having openly trained, armed, funded, equipped, and harbored this terrorist force since then – up to and including today – the “Sydney Siege” is but the latest, predictable fallout from the West’s global state-sponsored terrorism.

The so-called “Islamic State” – neither “Islamic” nor a “state” – is in reality simply a rebrand of Al Qaeda – Al Qaeda itself the terrorist front created by US and Saudi intelligence agencies as part of another covert, proxy war – then, against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Image: NATO’s proxy forces in Libya in 2011 attempted to cover

their ties to Al Qaeda. Today, they openly fly the “ISIS” flag. The

only constant is the West’s continued financial and military

sponsorship.

As evidence of this “rebrand,” nearly all organizations from North Africa, across the Middle East, and their affiliates in southern Russia, Central Asia, and even China which had previously operated either affiliated to or directly under the banner of Al Qaeda have seamlessly realigned themselves with ISIS.

These groups include Libyan terrorist organizations such as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) – both of whom received NATO air cover, weapons, and cash during the West’s 2011 bid to reorder the nation of Libya.

In all, from attempting to directly overthrow the Syrian government with a massive, regional armed terrorist front, to using this front as a pretext for direct military intervention, the story of ISIS’ rise is also the story of America’s hegemonic designs across the greater Middle East. The campaign of destruction across Syria and in neighboring countries is but one Western objective ISIS helps serve – the other is manipulating public perception through staged terror threats worldwide to create a climate of fear across the West and build support for expanding direct military intervention in both Syria and Iraq.

One must ask themselves, who truly possesses the ability – financially, strategically, tactically, and logistically – to conduct a regional war spanning three nations all while planning and carrying out terror attacks globally from the US to Australia? The answer is, the same interests that plotted to destroy US civilian airliners to provoke a war with Cuba in the 1960s and carried out an extensive terrorist campaign across Europe during the Cold War to frame the Soviet Union and its sympathizers while advancing its own political agenda among member nations. The answer is the US, NATO, and their allies.

Sydney is ISIS Haven – and the Government Knew for Decades



A torrent of fighters in Syria have streamed into the country from Sydney, Australia. Reuters would explain why in an article titled, “Crime and gangs: the path to battle for Australia’s Islamist radicals,” stating that:

At least half of Australia’s Muslims live in Sydney’s western suburbs, which were transformed in the mid-1970s from white working-class enclaves into majority-Muslim outposts by a surge of immigration from Lebanon.

And among these “outposts” have come many fighters eagerly seeking to join US-backed violence in Syria. Clearly within Sydney exists networks for indoctrinating and recruiting fighters – a network not only well known to Australian security agencies for literally decades, but most likely run directly by them and their American and British counterparts.

The infiltration of mosques across the West and their use in co-opting and directing operations to advance foreign and domestic policy is a matter of documented fact. British MI5 regularly infiltrates and co-opts Muslim leaders, cultivating and then co-opting radicals. The BBC would report in its article, “Abu Hamza trial: Defence claims radical worked with MI5,” that:

Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri acted as a secret intermediary with MI5, his lawyers have claimed.

The Egyptian-born preacher, on trial in New York charged with terror offences, claims he was tasked to “keep the streets of London safe”.

It is not the first time he has made the claim, having previously said that MI5 first contacted him in 1997.

Evidence to prove Abu Hamza’s defense was predictably ruled “inadmissible,”

Image: In 2005, then PM John Howard wanted Australia’s mosques infiltrated.

In the US and UK, most “radicals” are approached and manipulated for months

or even years by handlers from security agencies.

For Australia, as early as 2005, then Prime Minister John Howard would openly advocate similar infiltrations. In a Bloomberg report titled, “Australia’s Howard Says Govt May Infiltrate Mosques, Schools,” it stated:

Australian Prime Minister John Howard said the government may infiltrate mosques, prayer halls and schools to detect any teaching of the “virtues of terrorism.”

“We have a right to know whether there is, within any section of the Islamic community, a preaching of the virtues of terrorism,” Howard told Radio 6PR in Perth when asked if the government was prepared to “get inside” mosques, prayer halls and schools. Or, “whether any comfort or harbor is given to terrorism within that community.”

After extensive police raids netting numerous suspects in September 2014, and with Australia both supportive and complicit in the West’s growing surveillance grid, global audiences are expected to believe this latest event was spontaneous, unpredictable, and unpreventable, rather than a product of a radical community first scoured for recruits for the West’s proxy war, and now being used to stir up support for direct Western military intervention in that failed war.

Previously Staged “Sting” Operations May Shed Light on “Sydney Siege”

US terror operations literally engineered by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) bear a striking resemblance to the terror event in Sydney and may offer clues as to how it was really planned, by whom, and for what purpose. It was also in September of this year that the FBI “foiled” its own “ISIS” terror attack. The FBI’s own official press release stated (emphasis added):

According to court records, Elfgeeh attempted to provide material support to ISIS in the form of personnel, namely three individuals, two of whom were cooperating with the FBI. Elfgeeh attempted to assist all three individuals in traveling to Syria to join and fight on behalf of ISIS. Elfgeeh also plotted to shoot and kill members of the United States military who had returned from Iraq. As part of the plan to kill soldiers, Elfgeeh purchased two handguns equipped with firearm silencers and ammunition from a confidential source. The handguns were made inoperable by the FBI before the confidential source gave them to Elfgeeh.

A recent “ISIS” attack in Canada also included a suspect already known to both US and Canadian security agencies, who by all accounts should have already been arrested. His successful execution of a terror shooting appears to simply have been an entrapment operation where he received a functional weapon and a green light instead of a weapon made inoperable before being arrested.

One must wonder then, if the prospective terrorist who took hostages in Sydney received his weapon from security agents entrapping him as well. Was a functioning weapon given in place of an inoperative one, thus transforming a potentially “foiled” plot to a “live” attack as the FBI did in 1993 during the first World Trade Center bombing?

Indeed, in 1993, terrorists plotting to detonate a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center were under surveillance by the FBI. An FBI informant had noted in taped phone conversations with FBI agents that for some inexplicable reason, a functioning bomb was allowed by FBI agents to be built instead of an inoperative device. In their article, “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast,” the New York Times reported (emphasis added):

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City’s tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars.

While the role of Western security agencies in the recent “Sydney Siege” may never be known – what is known as absolute fact is that ISIS is a premeditated creation of the West to advance its foreign policy abroad, particularly in Syria and against the nation of Iran. It is also known as absolute fact that the use of terrorism by the West against its own people and those it considers its enemies has become a long established aspect of Western foreign and domestic policy. If the so-called “Sydney Siege” is merely a coincidence carried out by a lone gunman inspired by Western state-sponsored terrorism, than it is sensational serendipity standing in where duplicitous Western security agencies are almost always involved.

ISIS’ Inception



Revealed in a prophetic 2007 report “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh and published in the New Yorker, it was stated 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 cooperated 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.

Image: Militants the US had claimed were “moderate rebels” fighting Syria’s

government have recently been revealed as affiliates of Al Qaeda – armed

by the US with anti-tank missiles.

In 2011, under the cover of the US-engineered “Arab Spring,” heavily armed groups including Al Qaeda began from the very beginning, carrying out operations nationwide in every major Syrian city – this according to the US State Department’s own official designation of Al Nursra as an alias for Al Qaeda in Iraq, and as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The official statement by the US State Department reported that:

Since November 2011, al-Nusrah Front has claimed nearly 600 attacks – ranging from more than 40 suicide attacks to small arms and improvised explosive device operations – in major city centers including Damascus, Aleppo, Hamah, Dara, Homs, Idlib, and Dayr al-Zawr. During these attacks numerous innocent Syrians have been killed.

Yet despite this, the US and its allies, notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel, have all intentionally armed, funded, trained, equipped, assisted, harbored, and even have provided air cover for this very terrorist front. Groups armed directly by the United States would then hand over their weapons, equipment, not to mention their allegiance to Al Nusra and other Al Qaeda affiliates.

This goes far in explaining why billions of dollars in aid flooding into Syria supposedly into the arms of “moderate rebels” have instead resulted in a terrorist front spanning multiple nations and is now projecting its campaign of terror into Russia and China while planning and carrying out attacks in the US, Europe, and Australia. In other words, tales of “moderate rebels” were merely tenuous cover for the West’s intended plan to arm Al Qaeda in a proxy war, as was reported by Hersh in 2007.

ISIS Terror Serves Only One Purpose – Justifying Western Military Intervention

Taking hostages, waving around an ISIS flag, and making cartoonish demands to speak to Australia’s Prime Minister – were ISIS an actual independent military and political organization – serves no strategic, political, or tactical purpose. Instead, it serves only to reignite public outrage and stir up support for further Western military intervention in both Syria and Iraq and possibly beyond. Amid any criminal investigation, the question “cui bono” or “to whose benefit” must be asked and answered. Amid the rash of ISIS plots – including those not openly known to be entrapment operations carried out by Western security agencies themselves – the only winner is the West’s foreign policy of increasing hysteria at home and military intervention in Syria and Iraq abroad.



For those who question the ability of Western governments, particularly the US and NATO’s leadership, to carry out acts of terrorism against their own people, history provides ample evidence of their means, motivation, and will. Readers may recall Operation Northwoods, reported on in an ABC News article titled, “U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba,” which bluntly stated:

In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

After Operation Northwoods, which never went beyond conceptualization, was NATO’s Operation Glaido. This operation was part of larger “stay behind” networks established after World War II across Europe allegedly for the purpose resisting Soviet occupation had an invasion of Western Europe taken place.

Instead, the operation included multiple grisly assassinations, mass shootings, and terrorist bombings designed to demonize the Soviet Union as well as criminalize and crush support for left-leaning political parties growing in popularity in Western Europe. It would be determined that NATO’s own covert militant groups were killing innocent Western Europeans in order to effect a “strategy of tension” used to instill fear, obedience, and control over Western populations.

The use of ISIS “plots” to instill fear in the US, Canada, and now Australia is simply the next step in a clearly delineated evolutionary process of using terrorism as a means of insidiously advancing the West’s agenda – an evolutionary process with decades of trial and error distilling down to a consistent, easily identifiable pattern of “cause and effect” manipulation where struggling agendas are rushed through in the wake of “convenient” events upon a wave of emotionally-charged public sentiment – or sometimes, merely the illusion of such sentiment.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at Land Destroyer Report, Alternative Thai News Network and LocalOrg. Read other contributed articles by Tony Cartalucci here.