Is There A Crack in the Dam Holding Back the Truth on Syria?

by JiminNH

One cannot help but noticing two rather interesting articles published in mainstream media that just may indicate that the dam holding back the truth about the western-backed invasion of Syria by head-chopping, organ eating, sex slave trading jihadi “rebels” has sprung a few major leaks.

STEVEN KINZER in the BOSTON GLOBE

First came the article by Steven Kinzer, a longtime journalist with the New York Times and now a Professor and Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute, who published a piece in the eminently mainstream Boston Globe entitled “The Media Are Misleading the Public on Syria”. Mr. Kinzer was rather direct, pulling no punches from his very first sentence were he declared: “Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/02/18/the-media-are-misleading-public-syria/8YB75otYirPzUCnlwaVtcK/story.html

Prof. Kinzer initially focused on the situation in Aleppo, scene of most recent fighting but also a stronghold of al Nusra and its allies for over 3 years. He recapped how upon seizing the city the jihadi’s “rule began with a wave of repression. They posted notices warning residents: “Don’t send your children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get the coffin.”

He touched upon the destruction of industry in Aleppo, Syria’s second major city and formerly its industrial heartland, briefly mentioning how the rebels “destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it.

A brief internet search finds few western media ever touching upon this “liberation” of Syrian’s industrial capital and it finding “refuge” in the waiting arms of Turkey’s business sector, reminiscent of how the western press for over 18 months failed to even inquire into ISIS’ illicit oil trade with Turkey. While an article in the UK’s Guardian in 2013 touched upon the industrial looting, albeit in an article that seemingly lamented how the looting of assets degraded the progress against the Syrian army, no American press has written about this unseemly fact that demonstrates how the Turkish sponsors of the mythical “moderate Syrian rebels” profit from their destruction of a once vibrant industrial neighbor.

Mr. Kinzer briefly pulled back the veil of the western media’s recent pattern of intentionally conflating the multiplicity of jihadi militias that range from al Qaeda affiliate al Nusra Front to Salafist Ahrar al Sham to the now virtually non-exist FSA as generic “rebels” For example he writes “Washington-based reporters tell us that one potent force in Syria, al-Nusra, is made up of “rebels” or “moderates,” not that it is the local al-Qaeda franchise. Saudi Arabia is portrayed as aiding freedom fighters when in fact it is a prime sponsor of ISIS.”

While it is not every day that you read in a respected American newspaper like the Boston Globe that Saudi Arabia is the prime sponsor of ISIS, it is unfortunate that Mr. Kinzer did not refer to the August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency Memo, declassified thanks to a FOIA suit by the so-called “conservative think tank” Judicial Watch, that reveals exactly that, and more.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/pgs-287-293-291-jw-v-dod-and-state-14-812-2/

Had he done so, he could have supported his opinion with factual references to the contents of the Memo which show that not only do the Saudi’s back ISIS, but the US does as well, when it is listed as one of the “Supporting Powers” to the insurgents, and that there was a possibility of “establishing a Salafist Principality in eastern Syria, and this is exactly what the Supporting Powers want….”

Of course, that “Salafist Principality” is the Islamic State Caliphate.

Another unfortunate omission is that while applauding unnamed “Astonishingly brave correspondents in the war zone, including Americans” and recognizing that they report “at great risk to their own safety,” Mr. Kinzer failed to put a name to the face of that intrepid group, such as the late American-Iranian journalist Serena Shim who died in suspicious circumstances in Turkey after her reporting revealed that Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (called “MIT”) shipped arms and ammo to the rebels in humanitarian cargo trucks.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2799924/mystery-american-journalist-killed-car-crash-turkey-just-days-claimed-intelligence-services-threatened-coverage-siege-kobane.html

While such information as provided in Mr. Kinzer’s article is likely well known to readers of this blog, it would be nothing short of mind-boggling to the average American or westerner who, thanks to the media manipulation Mr. Kinzer so rightly criticizes, is oblivious to the realities of the “moderate Syrian rebels”, most of whom are not from Syria, and even ISIS itself being nothing but a western backed proxy army engaged in yet another illegal regime change operation.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, Jr. in POLITICO.COM

The next major article, actually a tour de force, was written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and posted on the online magazine Politico.com. Considering his past history of being able to publish in major print media, perhaps it says something that this incredible article is only posted on an on-line news source.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/rfk-jr-why-arabs-dont-trust-america-213601

Kennedy discussed at great length the history of nefarious conduct by the US CIA and allies in a number of coups in the Middle East, including Syria, Iraq and Iran, going back to the immediate post WW2 western intervention in Syria. He gave a solid run-down of CIA coup activity, and those who ran them, such as the notorious Allen Dulles and his expert regime changers Kermit Roosevelt and Rocky Stone.

He provided a bit of information from the “Bruce-Lovett Report” that showed how, unknown to most Americans but well known “on the Arab street,” the CIA was involved in coup plots in 5 Arab states, including Syria, between WW2 and its 1957 publication. Unfortunately, he did not provide a link to that report, and a search of the internet does not produce a copy of what must be interesting reading to those wishing to prevent history being repeated.

Mr. Kennedy focused extensively on the history of US, and allied (UK and French), coup activity in Syria. He mentioned how the post-WW2 patriots of Syria expelled the Nazi-allied Vichy French and declared their independence, but were immediately set upon by the CIA which orchestrated a coup after the democratically elected Pres. Shukri-al-Quwatli hesitated to approve a US backed “Trans Arabian Pipeline” to pump crude oil from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon. That coup set in motion a period of instability and several coups before another election saw Mr. Quawatli re-elected.

Not surprisingly, that re-election trigged yet another coup. This time, however, the US worked with the Muslim Brotherhood, invoking for the first time the use of what we would know refer to a Islamic jihadi terrorists, in their coup efforts that included the assassination of key military and intelligence figures. The plotters planned to use “false flag” events as a pretext to get US allies Iraq, then ruled by a UK-allied King, and Jordan to invade Syria. When the coup was discovered, the Syrians seized the US embassy and coerced a confession from CIA agent Stone, promptly denied by the Eisenhower administration. In response the US geared up for war, and attempted to get Turkey to invade, a plan squelched only by the lack of support among the then-independent Arab League. His article then outlines the reverberations of the CIA’s conduct, culminating in a number of revolutions in the Arab world, and their turn toward the embrace of the Soviet Union.

The article discussed US involvement in Iraq, to include aid the CIA provided to Saddam Hussein in his rise to power through his invasion of Iran at our direction. Interestingly, some familiar names popped up even then; the diabolical Donald Rumsfeld delivered both golden cowboy spurs and a list of chemical weapons to Hussein for use in the Iran-Iraq war.

Kennedy spent considerable time writing about the present Syrian conflict, and eloquently outlined the role of the proposed Qatar-Syria-Turkey pipeline, refused by Syrian Pres. Assad in favor of the Iran-Iraq-Syria “Friendship Pipeline”, in the fomenting of the war. He wrote:

“Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link.”

His review of events includes the involvement of Turkey, which would have greatly profited from the proposed Qatari pipeline in transit fees, in fomenting and fueling the conflict that has now cost an estimated 400,000+ people their lives, and of course Saudi Arabia, both for economic reasons and in pursuit of its war against Iran and the “Shiite Crescent.”

He touched upon the US’s funding of what are now known as the typical “color revolution” processes of funding opposition media and political groups, linking to this 2011 WaPo article on the subject:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-secretly-backed-syrian-opposition-groups-cables-released-by-wikileaks-show/2011/04/14/AF1p9hwD_story.html

He also delved into the US’ conscious decision, once again, to rely upon the fundamentalist Sunni jihadi warriors in their effort to topple Assad. He linked to a 2008 Rand report on the “Long War” to demonstrate the extent to which the US was ready to help foment and fan the flames of the “Shia-Sunni conflict” in order to attain geopolitical goals. The link is here:

http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG738.pdf

Perhaps most significantly, his is one of the few mainstream western media articles that touches in detail upon the above mentioned declassified 2012 DIA memo on the creation of the “Salafist Principality.” Kennedy did a good job of recapping the substance of that Memo, the release of which should have been explosive if our “free press” was not quite so controlled.

Kennedy “toed the party” line in some regards in his article, such as his discussion of Russian involvement in the pipeline matters, referring to the EU support for the Qatari pipeline “which would have given its members cheap energy and relief from Vladimir Putin’s stifling economic and political leverage” and war effort, and further suggesting that we remain involved in the mid-east partly for “guaranteeing the security of Israel’s borders” from the chaos in the region that the readers of this blog may well find to be instigated on behalf of that country. Despite any such minor blemishes, the tenor and substance if the piece is rarely seen in western media.

SUMMATION:

One cannot recommend more strongly the reading of these articles, and the citation of it when communicating the information therein whenever and wherever possible as we all contribute to challenging the false western narrative in the mainstream media. Hopefully these cracks in the dam holding back the truth on Syria will help open the floodgates of knowledge regarding the US and allied proxy war against Syria that is, as Kinzer wrote, one of the most shameful episodes in modern American history.

Only through the active spreading of heterodox voices like these will Kennedy’s concluding remarks have a chance of coming true:

“America’s founding fathers warned Americans against standing armies, foreign entanglements and, in John Quincy Adams’ words, “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Those wise men understood that imperialism abroad is incompatible with democracy and civil rights at home…. Over the past seven decades, the Dulles brothers, the Cheney gang, the neocons and their ilk have hijacked that fundamental principle of American idealism and deployed our military and intelligence apparatus to serve the mercantile interests of large corporations and particularly, the petroleum companies and military contractors that have literally made a killing from these conflicts.

It is time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by ending the ruinous addiction to oil that has warped U.S. foreign policy for half a century.”