Al-Qaeda’s Syrian wing is helping to finance its activities by selling the product of oilfields that once helped to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Up to 380,000 barrels of crude oil were previously produced by wells around the city of Raqqa and in the desert region to its east that are now in rebel hands – in particular Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda off-shoot which is the strongest faction in this part of the country.
Now the violently anti-Western jihadist group, which has been steadily extending its control in the region, is selling the crude oil to local entrepreneurs, who use home-made refineries to produce low-grade petrol and other fuels for Syrians facing acute shortages.
The ability of Jabhat al-Nusra to profit from the oil locally, despite international sanctions which have hindered its sale abroad, will be particularly worrying to the European Union, which has voted to ease the embargo but at the same time wants to marginalise the extremist group within the opposition.
In the battle for the future of the rebel cause, the oil-fields may begin to play an increasingly strategic role. All are in the three provinces closest to Iraq – Hasakeh, Deir al-Zour, and Raqqa, while the Iraqi border regions are the homeland of the Islamic State of Iraq, as al-Qaeda’s branch in the country calls itself.
It was fighters from Islamic State of Iraq, both Iraqi and Syrian, who are thought to have founded Jabhat al-Nusra as the protests against the rule of President Assad turned into civil war. Continue reading »
FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds was described as “the most gagged person in the history of the United States” by the American Civil Liberties Union. Was the Sunday Times pressured to drop its investigation into her revelations?
A whistleblower has revealed extraordinary information on the U.S. government’s support for international terrorist networks and organised crime. The government has denied the allegations yet gone to extraordinary lengths to silence her. Her critics have derided her as a fabulist and fabricator. But now comes word that some of her most serious allegations were confirmed by a major European newspaper only to be squashed at the request of the U.S. government.
In a recent book Classified Woman, Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI, describes how the Pentagon, CIA and State Department maintained intimate ties to al-Qaeda militants as late as 2001. Her memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, published last year, charged senior government officials with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia.
The war in Afghanistan may be winding down. But the Pentagon’s chief of irregular warfare still sees a war against al-Qaida that will last decades, all over the world — a prospect that prompted astonishment and constitutional debate in the Senate.
Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, “At least 10 to 20 years.”
*HOLDER SAID TO RECUSE HIMSELF FROM AP PHONE RECORDS CASE
*HOLDER SAID TO RECUSE HIMSELF BECAUSE HE WAS QUESTIONED IN CASE
Yesterday, the Associated Press revealed the Department of Justice had been secretly monitoring both the personal and work phones of numerous AP editors and reporters. So just what did Holder know? For now, it is not known if Holder authorized or even knew about the investigation.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday that he recused himself from the Justice Department’s controversial decision to secretly seize telephone records of the Associated Press.
Instead, the decision to seek the media records was made by the deputy attorney general, Holder said. Jim Cole currently holds that position.
According to Dr. Steve Pieczenik ‘The Sociopath Club’ (G. W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barck Obama, Hillary Clinton etc.) strikes again. (See video down below.)
After 9/11 he called for the indictment of George W. Bush & Dick Cheney, now he calls for the indictment of Barack Obama & Hillary Clinton.
Pieczenik was deputy assistant secretary of state under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker. His expertise includes foreign policy, international crisis management and psychological warfare. He served the presidential administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the capacity of deputy assistant secretary.
Take off your partisan hat and open your minds to the actual uninterrupted high treason that is part of the foreign policy establishment. Party politics is often just a show that plays to their respective bases. However, the tract and direction of extending the transnational empire just continues on a global scale. The full-blown treason committed by every administration that practices the internationalist vision of democracy domination is really a masquerade for worldwide dominion. Presidents are mere temporary talking heads for the oligarchy that actually rules. Murdering their own diplomats and hired help is incidental, when 1,455,590 Iraqi deaths since the U.S. invasion are ignored and dismissed.Just how well is the consistent and bipartisan aggressive interventionist foreign policy doing? Go over the list of The Arab Spring country by country.
The Wall Street Journal provides a timeline on U.S. Government Reaction to the Benghazi Attack. “For days after the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya, intelligence officials and the Obama administration said it was likely the outgrowth of protests sparked by an anti-Islamic video made in the U.S. Follow some of the administration statements on the Libya attack.”The infamous propaganda voice for the Obamaistas, Media Matters puts forth their partisan spin in, What Dick Cheney’s Benghazi Criticism Misses.
“David Martosko of the Daily Mail Online provided former Vice President Dick Cheney a platform to criticize the Obama administration’s failure to anticipate the September 11, 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, without noting that seven attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities occurred during the Bush administration.”
Such diversion seeks to limit focus on the literal events that caused the Benghazi attack and the real reasons why Ambassador Christopher Stevens was left to perish by the Obama/Clinton foreign policy team of betrayers.
The shameful chronicle of the intentional and politically motivated stand down that doomed Stevens and his defenders was sensitively told during Gregory Hicks’ 30 Minute Recount of Benghazi Attack. While the Congressional hearings were praised for the attempt to restrain partisan grandstanding, the Washington press corps avoids placing blame on the administration as a tenant of their loyalty test. A government cover-up is made easy when the imperium friendly media is reporting on a proclaimed progressive administration. Continue reading »
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.
CIA fingerprints are all over the Boston Marathon bombings.In this article, Jerry Mazza notes that the likely perpetrator of the bombings – Craft International – is a CIA spin-off. The patsies‘ Uncle Tsarny is part of the “family” of rogue CIA spook Graham Fuller. And the patsies were set up with the help of another rogue CIA spin-off – the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), which uses American tax dollars to murder innocent civilians by the thousands in Iran.
This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, the “radical Muslim terrorists” in Chechnya are heavily supported by the CIA; their job is to attack Russia, not the US. The whole idea of a “self-radicalized Chechen” attacking the US is preposterous.
This morning, the government of Israel contacted President Assad of Syria. They did so as the leader of a coalition now openly at war against Syria and Iran, with plans to broaden the conflict. Assad was told he would be allowed to continue his rule, but on the “Jordanian model,” as a puppet of Israel and Turkey.
ISRAELI ARTILLERY, “SHOCK AND AWE” FOR SYRIA’S ARMY
Israeli armor is now inside Syria, not just the occupied zone, but has closed the distance to Damascus and has that city under artillery fire.
The claimed air attacks are a ruse; Israel has been using 155 and 175 mm artillery, mobile howitzers of extreme range, enhanced by arms expert Gerald Bull, who was assassinated by Israeli agents in 1990 as his reward.
The artillery attacks on Syria, using time delay and cluster munitions, are in direct support of military actions with fire control and communications being supplied by Israeli UAV aircraft operating in Syrian air space in support of Al Qaeda led rebel group.
Israel’s real air force, from deep inside Syria
These terrorist groups, aided by extremists from Libya and the Gulf States are being trained and supplied in Jordan and Turkey. It is hard to ignore the fact that US troops, on a secret mission to verify Israeli claims of chemical weapon use by the Syrian government, are fully complicit in aiding Al Qaeda operations against the Syrian government.
As for chemical weapon use, a report from United Nations human rights investigators, according to Reuters, has verified that it is rebels who have been using these weapons, in particular, deadly Sarin Gas.
Former Swiss attorney general, Carla Del Ponte, representing the United Nations independent commission of inquiry, based in Geneva, is quoted in a televised interview:
“Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of Sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated.
This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.”
UN investigator Carla Del Ponte said that there is strong evidence that the rebels used chemical weapons, but that there is not evidence that the government used such weapons:
When it comes to the deep hole of lies and inconsistencies that US foreign policy is vis-a-vis Syria, it has two options: stop digging or double down. Following the earlier report by the UN that outright rejected the full blown White House propaganda push to make it seem that it was Assad’s regime that was using chemical weapons as a front to stage a military incursion against a very unappealing despot, that it was the Al-Qaeda assisted and potentially US-armed rebels who had in fact been using toxic sarin gas, there was some hope that the digging would stop. Instead, the doubling down began.
The White House says it’s highly likely that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, not the rebel opposition, was behind any chemical weapons use in Syria.
White House spokesman Jay Carney says there is certainly evidence that chemical weapons have been used. But Carney says the U.S. is highly skeptical of claims that rebels put them in play.
Indeed, when presented with fact, Carney gets highly skeptical. Recall from earlier:
Carla Del Ponte, a member of the UN independent commission of inquiry on Syria, said that testimony gathered from casualties and medical staff indicated that the nerve agent sarin gas was used by rebel fighters.
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