Were you under the impression that America's days of poorly-planned, unprovoked, regime change wars were over? Did you not vote for Hillary because Donald seemed like less of a neocon?

Well, think again!



The Donald Trump administration is expected to name John Hannah as the next US Syria envoy...

Hannah, who served as the top national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, currently is a senior counselor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Before serving as Cheney’s deputy national security adviser for the Middle East (2001-2004) and then national security adviser (2005-2009)...

Did you just get a cold chill down your spine? There's a very good reason for that.

John Hannah didn't just serve in the Vice President's office while it lied us into invading Iraq. Hannah led the effort to trick us into war.



On June 26, 2002, the INC wrote a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee staff identifying Hannah as the White House recipient of information gathered by the group through a U.S.-funded effort called the Information Collection Program. Knight Ridder obtained a copy of the letter and previously reported on it.

The letter, written by Entifadh Qanbar, then the director of the INC’s Washington office, identified 108 articles in leading Western news media to which it said the INC had funneled the same information that it fed to Hannah, as well as a senior Pentagon official.

The information included a claim by an INC-supplied defector, Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, that he had visited 20 secret nuclear, biological and chemical warfare facilities in Iraq.

Haideri’s claim first appeared in a Dec. 20, 2001, article in The New York Times and then in a White House background paper, “A Decade of Deception and Defiance,” released in conjunction with a Sept. 12, 2002, speech to the U.N. General Assembly by Bush.

Hannah was one of the architects of the infamous speech then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the United Nations.

Hannah was the guy that defended the material in the speech when Powell’s chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, challenged it's veracity.



Hannah was also at that time a supporter of an eccentric academic named Laurie Mylroie who had developed the bizarre conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein, not Islamic extremists such as Al Qaeda, was responsible for most of the world’s anti-United States terrorism. This was a notion discredited by the US intelligence community but embraced by neocons searching for reasons to go to war against the Iraqi dictator.

But wait, it gets better! Hannah was one of the members of Cheney's staff involved in outing Valerie Plame.

If you think lying us into a catastrophic war might change Hannah's tune, you don't know neocons. Failure never gets in the way of their agenda.



Some senior administration officials still relish the notion of a direct confrontation. One ambassador in Washington said he was taken aback when John Hannah, Vice President Cheney's national security adviser, said during a recent meeting that the administration considers 2007 "the year of Iran" and indicated that a U.S. attack was a real possibility.

OK. So the guy is a real dirt-bag, but what does that got to do with Syria?

I'm glad you asked.

I would like to direct the attention of the court to this WashPost article from March 26, 2005, with the title Bush Administration Probes Syria's Future With Assad's Opposition.

About halfway down the article you will find:



A meeting Thursday, hosted by new State Department "democracy czar" Elizabeth Cheney, brought together senior administration officials from Vice President Cheney's office, the National Security Council and the Pentagon and about a dozen prominent Syrian Americans, including political activists, community leaders, academics and an opposition group, a senior State Department official said...

U.S. officials, however, yesterday denied that the meeting was intended to coordinate efforts to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad's government....

Ghadry said the Syrian opposition was encouraged by the "open and constructive" meeting, which was attended by key players in the administration's democracy policy such as John Hannah from Cheney's office, Robert Danin from the National Security Council and the Pentagon's David Schenker.

In 2009-2010 Hannah was co-authoring reports calling for regime change in Syria with names like “Which Path to Persia?”, “Paths to Persia”, and “Towards a Post-Assad Syria”.

The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence just released a report that states the armed opposition groups and Sunni fighters in Syria are “probably no longer capable of overthrowing President Bashar Al-Assad or overcoming a growing military advantage”.

Given that fact, it sort of makes sense that our forces have began killing Syrian government troops.

I'm sure Hannah would agree that if you want to do something really f'd up, you've got to do it yourself.