Bolivia announces expulsion of CIA (USAID)

Bolivia announces expulsion of USAID

President Evo Morales announced the expulsion of USAID from Bolivia, accusing the US development agency of meddling in the country’s internal affairs.

• Bolivian President Evo Morales speaks with the press at the Palacio Quemado presidential palace in La Paz. Morales announced the expulsion of USAID representatives from Bolivia, accusing the US development agency of meddling in the country’s internal affairs. (AFP/Aizar Raldes)

LA PAZ: President Evo Morales on Wednesday announced the expulsion of USAID from Bolivia, accusing the US development agency of meddling in the country’s internal affairs.

The United States quickly dismissed the allegations as baseless, and said Bolivia’s action showed it did not want good ties with Washington.

In a fiery speech to workers on May Day, the leftist president of South America’s poorest country said the US Agency for International Development was in Bolivia “for political purposes, not social ones.”

“No more USAID, which manipulates and uses our leaders,” Morales said in the address in La Paz’s Plaza de Armas.

He did not specify exactly how he felt the US agency was interfering in Bolivian affairs. USAID has operated in the Andean nation since 1964.

Morales, a populist and Bolivia’s first indigenous president, has been in power since 2006 and has followed a sometimes nationalist agenda hostile to Western governments and companies.

In 2008 he expelled the US ambassador and agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, accusing them of meddling in Bolivia’s internal affairs.

Bolivia is a major producer of coca leaves, the raw material of cocaine.

During this previous crisis, the United States responded by expelling the Bolivian ambassador and ending trade privileges that it had granted Bolivia.

After a long period of frosty ties, the two countries in 2011 signed a framework agreement to normalize relations and exchange ambassadors again. but tensions remained.

“With the government of the United States we have profound differences of an ideological, cultural and, especially, policy-related nature,” Morales told the La Paz diplomatic corps last year.

“I hope that with the new framework agreement we can improve things, but I doubt it,” he said.

US State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said Wednesday that all USAID had done in Bolivia was simply to try to help people live better. Washington deeply regrets the decision by Bolivia, he said.

“We deny the baseless allegations made by the Bolivian government,” he added.

After five years of efforts to normalize relations after the 2008 crisis, he said, “this action is a further demonstration that the Bolivian government is not interested in that vision.”

The new US Secretary of State John Kerry had encouraged improved relations with Bolivia.

But bilateral ties suffered another blow recently when Morales said the United States was conspiring against the new government that has taken over Venezuela after the death of his ally Hugo Chavez.

And in early April, the United States announced it was ending the financial and logistical support it had given to Bolivia’s struggle against drug traffickers, although it did donate several aircraft.

In his speech Wednesday Morales said Bolivia was offended by recent Kerry comments to the effect that Latin America was the United States’ backyard.

The United States, he said, “probably thinks that here it can still manipulate politically and economically. That is a thing of the past.”

Morales instructed Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca to inform the US embassy of the expulsion of USAID, “that tool which still has a mentality of domination.”

In Bolivia, USAID has worked to help Bolivia improve its health care system and also runs a sustainable development and environmental program.

Specific goals include boosting farm productivity and food security, expanding access to social services and enhancing the competitiveness of small and medium sized companies, according to the USAID web site.

During Wednesday’s speech, Morales also announced several laws to benefit workers and recalled the seventh anniversary of his nationalization of the hydrocarbon sector, which affected nearly a dozen foreign oil companies.

- AFP/ac

Pakistani and Afghan Taliban Execute Two of Karzai’s Emissaries, Proving They Are ONE

[Two days ago, the Pakistani Taliban killed the son of another High Peace Council member, providing further evidence that the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban ARE ONE.  They are both waging war against Karzai's peace emissaries at the same time, proving that their actions are coordinated and their objectives are the same.  Both swear allegiance to Mullah Omar.  Mullah Omar and all of his armies owe allegiance to the Pak Army, since they are products of the Pakistani ISI. 

The purpose of terrorism is not to terrorize, but to motivate the victimized civilian populace into submission to unpleasant political conditions.  Those conditions can best be described as Wahhabi "Shariah."  Having the same goals since the beginning, the revived Taliban ("neo-Taliban") are there to give Pakistan control over Afghanistan,  If Obama actually intends to hand the Afghanistan transition to Pakistan, as rumored, he will be handing Afghanistan to the Taliban, completing his total "Islamization" of all Middle Eastern countries from Morroco to Islamabad.  Obama is pushing the radicalized faith upon the Muslim masses, just as surely if he has been the one issuing all of the jihadi "fatwas."]

“Hilal Ahmad Waqad was organizing a conference of Afghan and Pakistani religious scholars to oppose militancy.                                                                                                                                                                                    [He] was the son of Afghan cleric Amin Waqad, a member of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, which is trying to engage the Afghan Taliban in peace talks.”

Afghan peace council official killed in south

KABUL, Afghanistan—Insurgents ambushed an Afghan government peace negotiator on Wednesday, killing him and two bodyguards as they headed to a meeting in the south to discuss plans for local troops to take over responsibility from the U.S-led coalition, Afghan officials said.

Malim Shah Wali Khan, 53, who sat on a council tasked with starting talks with the Taliban in hopes of ending the nearly 12-year-old war, was killed when attackers hit his convoy with a bomb and automatic rifle fire, Helmand provincial spokesman Omer Zawak said.

The province’s deputy governor, Masoud Bakhtawer, was also wounded in the attack, which took place in the same district where Afghan forces will shortly be in control. Helmand has been one the war’s bloodiest battlefields and a traditional Taliban stronghold.

Khan was the provincial director of the High Peace Council, a group formed by President Hamid Karzai to try and find ways to initiate peace talks with the insurgents. The council has so far failed to start any form of negotiations with the Taliban since U.S.-initiated peace talks collapsed last year.

In a statement, Karzai “strongly condemned” the attack that killed Khan and said that “the enemies of Afghanistan are trying to attack and martyr those individuals who are doing their best to bring peace and stability to the country.”

The U.S.-led coalition has been handing over responsibility for security in the province, and around the country, to Afghan forces as foreign combat troops prepare to withdraw by end-2014. So far, the Afghan government is in charge of areas representing 80 percent of the country’s population. It hopes to assume full control by the early summer.

The British Ministry of Defense on Wednesday also said three of its soldiers were killed in Helmand by a roadside bomb. NATO had announced the deaths on Tuesday but had not identified the nationalities of the soldiers.

The soldiers were on patrol when their armored vehicle struck the bomb. Insurgents have increased their attacks in recent weeks and since they announced the start of their spring offensive on April 27.

In other developments, health officials were investigating why nearly 70 students at a high school near the capital became ill on Wednesday.

Amanullah Eman, a spokesman for the Education Ministry, said some students were briefly hospitalized but all were doing well. He said a number of factors were being investigated, including the use of fertilizers in nearby farm land.

There have been numerous cases of dozens of school children falling ill during the spring, when Afghan students return to school. Although some officials in the past have blamed the Taliban for attempting to poison students, the insurgents have repeatedly denied any involvement and no proof has ever been found of deliberate poisoning. Experts have instead blamed mass hysteria for many of the cases.

—

Mirwais Khan contributed from Kandahar and Patrick Quinn from Kabul.

hanistan—Insurgents ambushed an Afghan government peace negotiator on Wednesday, killing him and two bodyguards as they headed to a meeting in the south to discuss plans for local troops to take over responsibility from the U.S-led coalition, Afghan officials said.

Malim Shah Wali Khan, 53, who sat on a council tasked with starting talks with the Taliban in hopes of ending the nearly 12-year-old war, was killed when attackers hit his convoy with a bomb and automatic rifle fire, Helmand provincial spokesman Omer Zawak sai

Saudis Appear Frantic As They Attempt To Deflect Blame for Boston Bombing

[In a typical Saudi misdirection, the royals are anxiously trying to turn the investigation away from the one Saudi name that has been tied to the case, Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi.  The more they protest, and the louder their denials become, the more obvious it becomes that the masters of Sunni world terrorism have a lot to hide in this latest militant "Islamist" terror attack upon the citizens of the United States of America.  If our own FBI was not totally compromised by them and the never-ending cover-up of Saudi/CIA atrocities and an assortment of crimes against humanity, then they might pursue the Saudi connection to its logical conclusion, not to another predetermined dead-end.

FRY THE ROYALS!]

  Saudi foreign ministry, Prince Saud bin al-Faisal (R), had an unscheduled meeting with Obama in the Oval Office just two days after the Boston bombings

Saudi Arabia reportedly sent written warning to US about Boston Marathon bombing accused Tamerlan Tsarnaev

SAUDI Arabia reportedly sent a written warning to the US about Boston Marathon suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev last year and refused him entry to the country over security concerns.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia wrote to the US Department of Homeland Security about the older Tsarnaev brother in 2012, a senior Saudi official says.

The official told the Daily Mail the warning was based on intelligence from Yemen and was separate to concerns raised by Russian intelligence.

He also revealed Tamerlan was refused an entry visa into Saudi Arabia for the Mecca pilgrimage in December 2011.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 and his younger brother Dzhokhar are accused of carrying out the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon, which killed three and wounded more than 264 at one of the world’s premier sporting events.

The Saudi official said the warning, which was also shared with the UK Government, was “very specific” and warned “something was going to happen in a major US city”.

The “government-to-government” letter “did name Tamerlan specifically”, the official told the Daily Mail.

An official from Homeland Security denied the department had received any such warning from Saudi Arabia.

“DHS has no knowledge of any communication from the Saudi government regarding information on the suspects in the Boston Marathon Bombing prior to the attack,” an unnamed offical told the Daily Mail.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a shootout with police as he tried to flee the Boston area three days after the bombing.

Dzhokhar was wounded and captured, and now faces terror charges carrying a possible death sentence.

The Saudi official said the letter was sent by the Saudi Ministry of Interior in part so the US could inspect packages being sent to Tamerlan in the post.

“With Saudi Arabia it’s always code red,” he said.

“There’s no code orange, or code yellow. Always red.”

Zionist Wahhabis

[SEE:  Saudi Arabia working with Mossad against Iran, WikiLeaks suggests ;  Saudi Arabia is Israel’s last hope: report ]

The Saudi/Israeli Alliance

deLiberation

by Dean Henderson
Monday, April 9th, 2012

(Excerpted from Chapter 5: Persian Gulf Rent-a-Sheik: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

Iran’s Press TV reported yesterday that both the US and the Saudis began funding Syrian rebels eight months ago. After funding Libyan Islamist rebels to overthrow Qaddafi, the Saudis and their fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) despots have moved on in an effort to bring down Syria’s Assad government on their road to Tehran.

Both the Muslim Brotherhood House of Saud and Cabalist Israel share a long history with their Freemason brethren at British intelligence dating back to the Egyptian Mystery Schools.

The inbred Illuminati banker oligarchy runs all three secret societies and controls the global economy via central bank monopoly and hegemony over oil, arms and drug trades.

This Rothschild-led cabal of trillionaire Satanists manufacture fanatics within the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths to divide the people and maximize war profits.

Since Chevron discovered oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938, the House of Saud monarchy has increasingly served as paymaster for Rothschild covert military adventures.  It’s part of an oil for arms quid pro quo.

The Saudis sent over $3.8 billion to the CIA-trained Afghan mujahadeen.  Their emissary to the Americans was Osama bin Laden.

They gave $35 million to the Nicaraguan contras. Northrup/Lockheed bribe recipient Adnan Khashoggi played a key role in supplying Richard Secord’s Enterprise with House of Saud funding.  But while contra and mujahadeen efforts got the most newsprint, the House of Saud was busy bankrolling counterinsurgency around the world.

In Africa the Saudis provided support decades ago for the National Front for Salvation (NFS), which operated from bases in Chad in its attempts to overthrow Libyan President Mohamar Qaddafi.

Chad has long been an important country in Exxon Mobil’s North Africa oil production schemes.  In 1990- following a successful Libyan-backed counter-coup against the Chad government which was sponsoring NFS- the US evacuated 350 NFS leaders with Saudi financing.  The US restored $5 million in aid to the dictatorial Kenyan government of Daniel Arap Moi so Kenya would house the NFS leaders, whom other African governments refused to take in.  Arap Moi later aided CIA covert operations in Somalia, which the Saudis financed.

The Saudis bankrolled Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA rebels in Angola in their brutal effort to topple the socialist government of MPLA President Jose dos Santos.  Upon CIA request, the Saudis sent millions to Morocco to pay for that country’s training of UNITA.  Angola has huge oil reserves.  In 1985 Chevron Texaco accounted for 75% of Angola’s oil revenue.  In 1990 29% of Exxon Mobil’s US-bound crude came from Angola. An annual report of De Beers- the Oppenheimer-family tentacle which monopolizes the world diamond trade- bragged of buying up UNITA diamonds.  Savimbi was welcomed at the White House by President Reagan.

The Saudis funded RENAMO in their CIA-backed Pink Plan terror campaign against the nationalist government of Mozambique.  In the mid-1980s both the Saudis and Oman sent weapons to RENAMO through the Comoros Islands on behalf of Israel and apartheid South Africa.  Two Comoros Presidents- Ali Soilah and Ahmed Abdullah Abderemane- were assassinated by mercenaries who were protecting the arms traffic.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – formerly Zaire- Illuminati puppet Mobutu Sese-Seiko ruled with an iron fist for nearly four decades. He served as City of London guard dog of Zaire’s rich cobalt, uranium and molybdenum reserves- all of which are vital to the US nuclear weapons program.  Zaire is also rich in copper, chromium, zinc, cadmium, tin, gold and platinum.  While Mobutu amassed over $5 billion in Swiss, Belgian and French bank accounts, Zaire’s people lived in squalor.

Mobutu was installed in the early 1960’s after CIA agent Frank Carlucci- later Reagan and Bush Defense Secretary and now chairman of bin Laden family investment advisor Carlyle Group- worked with gangsters to assassinate the first prime minister of the Congo Patrice Lumumba.  Under Mobutu’s reign the US had military bases at Kitona and Kamina- from where the CIA prosecuted covert wars against Angola, Mozambique and Namibia with House of Saud funding.  Mobutu’s DSP palace guard was trained by the Israeli Mossad.  In the late 1970’s the Saudis paid for imported Moroccan troops to save Mobutu from Katanganese secessionists led by Laurant Kabila.

Mobutu was deposed in 1998 by forces loyal to Kabila- a friend of Fidel Castro.  The Saudis began financing military forays into the Congo by the governments of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. This destabilization of the Lake’s region led to the Rwandan genocide.  Kabila was assassinated in 2000, after he refused to play Illuminati ball.  Over four million people have died in the DRC over the past decade.

Lumumba and Kabila weren’t the first African nationalists targeted for elimination by the inbreds.  During the 1950′s and 1960′s the CIA and French intelligence assassinated Moroccan nationalist Mehdi Ben Barka- whose Union Nationale de Forces Populaire threatened US puppet monarch King Hassan II.  Giunea’s leftist President Sekou Toure and Tunisian socialist Habib Bourgiba were also assassinated by Western intelligence agencies.

In 1993 Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir accused the Saudis of providing arms to Johnny Garung’s Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).  The southern part of Sudan- which the SPLA is trying to partition- is rich in oil.  Mossad has supplied the SPLA for years through Kenya.  In 1996 the Clinton Administration announced military aid to Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda. The aid was funneled into an SPLA offensive on Khartoum.  The crisis in Darfur is a direct result of Saudi/Israeli/US meddling on behalf of Big Oil.

Algerian President Chadli Benjladid accused the Saudis of bankrolling the barbarous Armed Islamic Group (AIG) who- after Algeria protested US ignition of the Gulf War- launched a reign of terror targeted at the Algerian people. Benjladid was forced to resign. This was followed by hasty passage of the Hydrocarbon Law- which opened the historically socialist country’s oilfields to the Four Horsemen.  The CIA then helped AIG terrorists travel to Bosnia, where they helped destroy socialist Yugoslavia.

Algeria has a long history of defying Big Oil. President Houari Boumedienne- one of the great Arab socialist leaders of all time- initiated calls for a more just international economic order in fiery speeches at the UN. He encouraged producer cartels as a means to Third World emancipation from the London bankers.  Independent Italian oilman Enrico Mattei began negotiating with Algeria and other nationalistic OPEC states who wanted to sell their oil internationally without having to deal with the Four Horsemen.  In 1962 Mattei died in a mysterious plane crash.  Former French intelligence agent Thyraud de Vosjoli says his agency was involved.  William McHale of Time magazine, who covered Mattei’s attempt to break the Big Oil cartel, also died under strange circumstances.

In 1975 the US sent $138 million in military aid through Saudi Arabia to Yemen, in hopes of heading off a Marxist revolution there.  The effort failed and the country split into North and South Yemen for two decades before merging again in the 1990’s. US/Saudi aid to both Yemen and Oman continues to this day in an effort to stamp out nationalist movements in those countries, which border the Kingdom and its vast Four Horsemen-controlled oilfields.

During the US-led effort to partition Bosnia from Yugoslavia, Saudi King Faud led calls for an end to the UN arms embargo.  When the embargo was lifted, the Saudis funded Bosnian Muslim arms purchases.  Later the Saudis bankrolled the heroin-kingpin Kosovo Liberation Army, as well as NLA Albanian separatists attacking the nationalist government of Macedonia. The Saudis even funded CIA covert operations in Italy, where they plunked down $10 million in 1985 to help destroy the Communist Party.

Recently Saudi Prince Bandar donated $1 million to the Bush Sr. Presidential Library and another $1 million to a Barbara Bush literacy campaign. On the evening of September, 11, 2001- Prince Bandar smoked cigars in the White House with President Bush, while members of the bin Laden family were evacuated from the US in airspace shut down to all other traffic.

Were the Saudis simply playing their historic paymaster role in the prosecution of 911?

The largest shareholder in News Corporation – parent of both the banker mouthpiece Wall Street Journal and the Fox News psyop – is Rupert Murdoch. The 2nd largest owner is Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal.

Is Fox News a covert Rothschild mind control operation against the American people?

Sources:

1. “Mercenary Mischief in Zaire”. Jane Hunter. Covert Action Information Bulletin. Spring 1991.
2. Hot Money and the Politics of Debt. R.T. Naylor. The Linden Press/Simon & Schuster. New York. 1987. p.238
3. Hunter
4. Earth First! Journal. Vol. 26, #1. Samhain/Yule. 2005
5. “US to Aid Regimes to Oust Government”. David B. Ottaway. Washington Post. 11-10-96
6. The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Fascism. Henrik Kruger. South End Press. Boston. 1980. p.43
7. The Gulf: Scramble for Security. Raj Choudry. Sreedhar Press. New Dehli.
8. 1983. p.14
9. Dude, Where’s My Country. Michael Moore. Warner Books. New York. 2003.
10. ABC News Online. 10-19-04

Dean Henderson is the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries and Das Kartell der Federal Reserve. Subscriptions to his Left Hook blog are FREE at www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

Qatar-Brotherhood Alliance Key Component of CIA Scheme To Rule Greater Middle East

[SEE: GCC official slams Muslim Brotherhood’s UAE threats ;  UAE uncovers Muslim Brotherhood cell, arrests its members] The controversial Qatar-Brotherhood alliance

By Andrew Hammond

U.S. President Barack Obama (R) listens to Qatar Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thaniat at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, April 23, 2013. REUTERS/Larry Downing (UNITED STATES – Tags: POLITICS)

DUBAI: Of all Qatar’s policy innovations since a coup brought the emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, to power in 1995, its overt alliance with Islamist movements linked to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has perhaps been the most controversial so far. There is deep unease in Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over the ascendancy of the Brotherhood, a well-established political outfit that seeks power through democracy, following the uprising that brought down Hosni Mubarak two years ago. And since last November, when President Mohammad Mursi adopted sweeping powers and then rushed the completion of an Islamist-friendly constitution, Egypt has seen civil strife between various Islamist and non-Islamic factions that is grinding the economy into the Nile mud as tourists stay away, industry slows down and the government cannot pay its bills. So it has become rather fashionable in many circles to predict the imminent demise of Qatar’s alliance with the Brotherhood. The question of Qatar – whose natural gas wealth has transformed the small Gulf state’s fortunes – has become a favorite parlor game from Cairo to Dubai. Influenced by this pervasive anti-Brotherhood atmosphere in their host countries, diplomats, analysts, policymakers and journalists wonder if Qatar as a state will be forced to change tack, or whether there could be backlash against certain members of the ruling elite themselves for the insolence of their dissonant tone. Inside Qatar itself, however, there is little sense that Islamists are about to be knocked off their pedestal. A notable presence in university departments, think tanks and other non-governmental organizations, they also form a constant stream of visitors for seminars and forums. Although there is no official Brotherhood branch in Qatar, leading Brotherhood-linked preacher Yousef al-Qaradawi has been in Doha for decades and is a key reference for many Qataris. “Qaradawi is not new in Qatar and the Brotherhood is not new in Qatar. When the modern state was established, the Education Ministry and other institutions were set up by many Muslim Brotherhood people,” said Jassim Sultan, a Qatari who runs the Islamist, pro-Brotherhood website 4nahda.com. Like others, he believes the close circle around the emir responsible for policy is driven by a strategic vision of how to secure independence from Saudi Arabia rather than ideological affinity for the Islamists per se. Salah Elzein, a Sudanese who heads the Al-Jazeera Center for Studies, agreed and said Qatar had played a key role in making the Brotherhood acceptable to Western powers. “The Qatari leadership realized Islamists would be a power to reckon with. At same time, Qatar was in good relationship with Israel and West. There is a huge difference in the way the United States deals with Islamists compared to 10 years ago,” he said. “People miss that Qatar invested a lot [in Islamists]. It started way before, it didn’t happen just now as mere opportunism with the Muslim Brotherhood.” Qatari rulers have traditionally promoted Saudi Salafism. The founder of the modern state, Sheikh Jassim, who died in 1913, was a follower of the puritanical Wahhabi school of Saudi Arabia. The presence of Qaradawi and Brotherhood cadres from Egypt since the 1960s was seen as a moderating force, and liberals have gained in recent years as the leadership plots to turn Doha into a world city that will host sports fans from around the world for the 2022 World Cup. A large mosque in the name of Mohammad Ibn Abdul-Wahhab, the Salafist ideologue who helped found the modern Saudi state, was opened in 2011 in Doha, in an apparent effort to mollify Salafists over liberal and Brotherhood gains. “The Salafi hard-liners are not happy about the opening [to other groups], but they are quite free here, there are no restrictions against them,” said Mohammad Alahmari, a Saudi who runs a Doha think tank. There is unease over the Brotherhood policy among liberals. “The Muslim Brotherhood is running the show. They have a monopoly and you get attacked if you attack the Brotherhood. It’s new and it became more clear that Al-Jazeera is backing them in the last five years,” said Najeeb al-Nuaimi, a former justice minister. Tensions with the UAE have led to some Qataris being barred from entry at airports and an official from Qatar Petroleum has been held in detention this year for undeclared reasons (SEE: As family frets, Qatari doctor’s detention in Dubai stretches on). “Maybe most people support it, but intellectuals ask, where will this lead to?” said Hassan al-Sayed, a constitutional law professor at Qatar University. “Some think it could lead to disasters, politically, financially, even on a personal level.” Dissent among the public has focused more on the breakneck growth of Doha and plans to expand the country’s population to some 5 million people, although Qatari nationals form less than 300,000 of a 1.9 million population at present. Little more than a sleepy backwater in the 1990s, the city has been transformed beyond all recognition. The sleepy downtown area of the old Souq Waqef faces off against the otherworldly skyscrapers of the West Bay district, which, arising out of the sea on reclaimed land, give the impression of floating on air. “There is no precise information about reasons and justifications for controversial public policies. This means that Qataris are always surprised by policy decisions, as if they were a private affair that citizens have no right to know about or take part in,” wrote academic Ali al-Kuwari in a book published last year called “The People Want Reform In Qatar Too,” the result of a year of monthly salons among intellectuals organized by Kuwari. And the jailing of poet Mohammad Ibn al-Dhaib al-Ajami after a poem that attacked Arab rulers in the wake of the uprisings in 2011 revealed a certain regime jitteriness. Even if Qatar wanted to, decoupling from a widespread and influential organization like the Brotherhood would not be an easy task. Nuaimi says it will depend on the fate of Islamist rule in Egypt and Tunisia: “They think the Brotherhood is the political future of the Arab world. I think they are wrong. I predict that in five years they will be out in Egypt and Tunisia and then Qatar will put them aside.”

CIA Bribery Squandered Every Potential Gain of Operation Enduring Freedom

Millions in CIA “ghost money” paid to Afghan president’s office: New York Times 

Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks during a news conference in Kabul January 14, 2013.              Credit:   Reuters/Omar Sobhani

(Reuters) – Tens of millions of U.S. dollars in cash were delivered by the CIA in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags to the office of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai for more than a decade, according to the New York Times, citing current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

The so-called “ghost money” was meant to buy influence for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) but instead fuelled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan, the newspaper quoted U.S. officials as saying.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan“, one American official said, “was the United States.”

The CIA declined to comment on the report and the U.S. State Department did not immediately comment. The New York Times did not publish any comment from Karzai or his office.

“We called it ‘ghost money’,” Khalil Roman, who served as Karzai’s chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, told the New York Times. “It came in secret and it left in secret.”

For more than a decade the cash was dropped off every month or so at the Afghan president’s office, the newspaper said.

Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the CIA in Afghanistan since the start of the war.

The cash payments to the president’s office do not appear to be subject to oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or the CIA’s formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies, and do not appear to violate U.S. laws, said the New York Times.

There was no evidence that Karzai personally received any of the money, Afghan officials told the newspaper. The cash was handled by his National Security Council, it added.

U.S. and Afghan officials familiar with the payments were quoted as saying that the main goal in providing the cash was to maintain access to Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the CIA’s influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan’s highly centralized government.

Much of the money went to warlords and politicians, many with ties to the drug trade and in some cases the Taliban, the New York Times said. U.S. and Afghan officials were quoted as saying the CIA supported the same patronage networks that U.S. diplomats and law enforcement agents struggled to dismantle, leaving the government in the grip of organized crime.

In 2010, Karzai said his office received cash in bags from Iran, but that it was a transparent form of aid that helped cover expenses at the presidential palace. He said at the time that the United States made similar payments.

The latest New York Times report said much of the Iranian cash, like the CIA money, went to pay warlords and politicians.

For most of Karzai’s 11-year reign, there has been little interest in anti-corruption in the army or police. The country’s two most powerful institutions receive billions of dollars from donors annually but struggle just to recruit and maintain a force bled by high rates of desertion.

(Additional reporting by Alistair Bell and Sarah Lynch in Washington; Writing by Michael Perry; Editing by Mark Bendeich)

The American Plan To Liberalize “Islam”

[In 2003, long before any hint of an "Arab spring," the RAND Corp. produced the following document (click on title for pdf).  This is the strategy which has been followed by Barack Obama since Day One.  If the strategy is not a crime against humanity, or at least against religion itself, then it should be, since no man has the right to alter someone else's religion.  That is exactly what this strategy proposes and Obama has been fully committed to, changing Islam itself, from the inside out.  Liberalize it, so that it becomes as acceptable to the international community as any other religion.  This means removing all of the bloody parts of Islam, in order to manufacture a new liberalized product which resembles Sufi Islam, which is an acceptable substitute for Wahhabism. 

RAND proposes that we now introduce this Sufi-like anti-Wahhabism, in order to undo what we have done with the CIA's grand experiment in using American military power as a tool for social engineering.  The weaponized "Islam," followed by the weaponization of the Afghan "mujahedeen," who had received the new synthetic "Islam," produced the first generation of "jihadi" "holy warriors."   The incalculable damage which has been done to peace-loving Islam since then, by the introduction of the CIA's weaponized Wahhabi Islam to the Muslim world over the past three-and-a-half decades, is now to be undone in just one "Spring," or a half-dozen?  The scale of the arrogance shown by the American meddlers in purposely doing this, and now attempting to undo what they have done, in order to gain further advantage, is on the level of a Hitler, or a Mussolini. 

When is Obama, or some other evil wise ass going to straighten-out the deficiencies in Christianity, or (God forbid!) Judaism?  We have no right by any stretch of the imagination to do what has been laid-out in the 88-pages of Civil Democratic Islam.]

Civil Democratic Islam

RAND CORP.

2003 RAND Corporation

iii
PREFACE
The Islamic world is involved in a struggle to determine its own nature and values,
with serious implications for the future. What role can the rest of the world,
threatened and affected as it is by this struggle, play in bringing about a more
peaceful and positive outcome?
Devising a judicious approach requires a finely grained understanding of the
ongoing ideological struggle within Islam, to identify appropriate partners and
set realistic goals and means to encourage its evolution in a positive way.
The United States has three goals in regard to politicized Islam. First, it wants to
prevent the spread of extremism and violence. Second, in doing so, it needs to
avoid the impression that the United States is “opposed to Islam.” And third, in
the longer run, it must find ways to help address the deeper economic, social,
and political causes feeding Islamic radicalism and to encourage a move toward
development and democratization.
The debates and conflicts that mark the current Islamic world can make the
picture seem confusing. It becomes easier to sort the actors if one thinks of
them not as belonging to distinct categories but as falling along a spectrum.
Their views on certain critical marker issues help to locate them correctly on
this spectrum.
It is then possible to see which part of the spectrum is generally compatible
with our values, and which is fundamentally inimical. On this basis, this report
identifies components of a specific strategy.
This report should be of interest to scholars, policymakers, students, and all
others interested in the Middle East, Islam, and political Islam.

****************************

Chapter Three
A PROPOSED STRATEGY

The problem of Islamic radicalism—its manifestations, its underlying causes,
and its propensity to meld with other social and political conflicts—makes this
an extremely complex issue. There is no one correct approach or response, and
there certainly is not one identifiable “fix.” Instead, what is called for is a mixed
approach that rests on firm and decisive commitment to our own fundamental
values and understands that tactical and interest-driven cooperation is simply
not possible with some of the actors and positions along the spectrum of
political Islam but that possesses a sequence of flexible postures suitable to
different contexts, populations, and countries.
This approach seeks to strengthen and foster the development of civil, democratic
Islam and of modernization and development. It provides the necessary
flexibility to deal with different settings appropriately, and it reduces the danger
of unintended negative effects. The following outline describes what such a
strategy might look like:
• Support the modernists first, enhancing their vision of Islam over that of the
traditionalists by providing them with a broad platform to articulate and
disseminate their views. They, not the traditionalists, should be cultivated
and publicly presented as the face of contemporary Islam.
• Support the secularists on a case-by-case basis.
• Encourage secular civic and cultural institutions and programs.
• Back the traditionalists enough to keep them viable against the fundamentalists
(if and wherever those are our choices) and to prevent a closer
alliance between these two groups. Within the traditionalists, we should
selectively encourage those who are the relatively better match for modern
civil society. For example, some Islamic law schools are far more amenable
to our view of justice and human rights than are others.
• Finally, oppose the fundamentalists energetically by striking at vulnerabilities
in their Islamic and ideological postures, exposing things that neither the youthful idealists in their target audience nor the pious traditionalists
can approve of: their corruption, their brutality, their ignorance, the bias
and manifest errors in their application of Islam, and their inability to lead
and govern.
Some additional, more-direct activities will be necessary to support this overall
approach, such as the following:
• Help break the fundamentalist and traditionalist monopoly on defining,
explaining, and interpreting Islam.
• Identify appropriate modernist scholars to manage a Web site that answers
questions related to daily conduct and offers modernist Islamic legal opinions.
• Encourage modernist scholars to write textbooks and develop curricula.
• Publish introductory books at subsidized rates to make them as available as
the tractates of fundamentalist authors.
• Use popular regional media, such as radio, to introduce the thoughts and
practices of modernist Muslims to broaden the international view of what
Islam means and can mean.

****************************

Appendix C
STRATEGY IN DEPTH

The following describes, in somewhat more detail, how the recommendations
in Chapter Three could be implemented.
BASIC POINTS OF THE STRATEGY
Build Up a Modernist Leadership
Create role models and leaders. Modernists who risk persecution should be
built up as courageous civil rights leaders, which indeed they are. There are
precedents showing that this can work. Nawal Al-Sadaawi achieved international
renown for enduring persecution, harassment, and attempts to prosecute
her in court on account of her principled modernist stand on issues related to
freedom of speech, public health, and the status of women in Egypt. Afghan
interim minister of women’s affairs Sima Samar inspired many with her outspoken
stance on human rights, women’s rights, civil law, and democracy, for
which she faced death threats by fundamentalists. There are many others
throughout the Islamic world whose leadership can similarly be featured.
Include modern, mainstream Muslims in political “outreach” events, to reflect
demographic reality. Avoid artificially “over-Islamizing the Muslims”; instead,
accustom them to the idea that Islam can be just one part of their identity.1
Support civil society in the Islamic world. This is particularly important in situations
of crisis, refugee situations, and postconflict situations, in which a democratic
leadership can emerge and gain practical experience through local NGOs
and other civic associations. On the rural and neighborhood levels, as well, civic
associations are an infrastructure that can lead to political education and a
moderate, modernist leadership.
______________
1This idea is more extensively developed in Al-Azmah (1993). Al-Azmah is himself a “Euro-Muslim.”

 

Develop Western Islam: German Islam, U.S. Islam, etc. This requires gaining a
better understanding of the composition, as well as the evolving practice and
thought, in these communities. Assist in eliciting, expressing, and “codifying”
their views.
Go on the Offensive Against Fundamentalists
Delegitimize individuals and positions associated with extremist Islam. Make
public the immoral and hypocritical deeds and statements of self-styled fundamentalist
authorities. Allegations of Western immorality and shallowness are
a cherished part of the fundamentalist arsenal, but they are themselves highly
vulnerable on these fronts.
Encourage Arab journalists in popular media to do investigative reporting on
the lives and personal habits and corruption of fundamentalist leaders. Publicize
incidents that highlight their brutality—such as the recent deaths of Saudi
schoolgirls in a fire when religious police physically prevented Saudi firefighters
from evacuating the girls from their burning school building because they were
not veiled—and their hypocrisy, illustrated by the Saudi religious establishment,
which forbids migrant workers from receiving photographs of their newborn
children on the grounds that Islam forbids human images, while their own
offices are decorated by huge portraits of King Faisal, etc. The role of “charitable
organizations” in financing terror and extremism has begun to be more clearly
understood since September 11 but also deserves ongoing and public investigation.
Assertively Promote the Values of Western Democratic Modernity
Create and propagate a model for prosperous, moderate Islam by identifying
and actively aiding countries or regions or groups with the appropriate views.
Publicize their successes. For example, the 1999 Beirut Declaration for Justice
and the National Action Charter of Bahrain broke new ground in the application
of Islamic law and should be made more widely known.
Criticize the flaws of traditionalism. Show the causal relationship between
traditionalism and underdevelopment, as well as the causal relationship
between modernity, democracy, progress, and prosperity. Do fundamentalism
and traditionalism offer Islamic society a healthy, prosperous future? Are they
successfully meeting the challenges of the day? Do they compare well with
other social orders? The UNDP social development report (UNDP, 2002) points
clearly to the linkage between a stagnant social order, oppression of women,
poor educational quality, and backwardness. This message should be energetically
taken to Muslim populations.

Build up the stature of Sufism. Encourage countries with strong Sufi traditions
to focus on that part of their history and to include it in their school curricula.
Pay more attention to Sufi Islam.
Focus on Education and Youth
Committed adult adherents of radical Islamic movements are unlikely to be
easily influenced into changing their views. The next generation, however, can
conceivably be influenced if the message of democratic Islam can be inserted
into school curricula and public media in the pertinent countries. Radical fundamentalists
have established massive efforts to gain influence over education
and are unlikely to give up established footholds without a struggle. An equally
energetic effort will be required to wrest this terrain from them.
SPECIFIC ACTIVITIES TO SUPPORT THE STRATEGY
Thus, to accomplish the overall strategy, it will be necessary to
• Support the modernists and mainstream secularists first, by
— publishing and distribute their works
— encouraging them to write for mass audiences and youth
— introducing their views into the curriculum of Islamic education
— giving them a public platform
— making their opinions and judgments on fundamental questions of
religious interpretation available to a mass audience, in competition
with those of the fundamentalists and traditionalists, who already have
Web sites, publishing houses, schools, institutes, and many other vehicles
for disseminating their views
— positioning modernism as a “counterculture” option for disaffected
Islamic youth
— facilitating and encouraging awareness of pre- and non-Islamic history
and culture, in the media and in the curricula of relevant countries
— encouraging and supporting secular civic and cultural institutions and
programs.
• Support the traditionalists against the fundamentalists, by
— publicizing traditionalist criticism of fundamentalist violence and
extremism and encouraging disagreements between traditionalists and
fundamentalists
— preventing alliances between traditionalists and fundamentalists

— encouraging cooperation between modernists and traditionalists who
are closer to that end of the spectrum, increase the presence and profile
of modernists in traditionalist institutions
— discriminating between different sectors of traditionalism
— encouraging those with a greater affinity to modernism—such as the
Hanafi law school as opposed to others to issue religious opinions that,
by becoming popularized, can weaken the authority of backward
Wahhabi religious rulings
— encouraging the popularity and acceptance of Sufism.
• Confront and oppose the fundamentalists, by
— challenging and exposing the inaccuracies in their views on questions
of Islamic interpretation
— exposing their relationships with illegal groups and activities
— publicizing the consequences of their violent acts
— demonstrating their inability to rule to the benefit and positive development
of their communities
— targeting these messages especially to young people, to pious traditionalist
populations, to Muslim minorities in the West, and to women
— avoiding showing respect or admiration for the violent feats of fundamentalist
extremists and terrorists, instead casting them as disturbed
and cowardly rather than evil heroes
— encouraging journalists to investigate issues of corruption, hypocrisy,
and immorality in fundamentalist and terrorist circles.
• Selectively support secularists, by
— encouraging recognition of fundamentalism as a shared enemy, discouraging
secularist alliances with anti-U.S. forces on such grounds as
nationalism and leftist ideology
— supporting the idea that religion and the state can be separate in Islam,
too, and that this does not endanger the faith.

World View: Obama’s Meeting with Jordan’s Abdullah may Signal Troop Deployment

View Larger Map

[Mossad source Debkafile reports that Obama has ordered 20,000 US troops w/equipment to King Hussein Air Base Mafraq, near the border with Syria.  Mafraq is also the location of several refugee camps, holding hundreds of thousands of Syrians.  With the help of the little Jordanian king Obama may be about to try to tilt the scales of the Syrian civil war in favor of the so-called "moderate" faction.  If this is the case, then he probably informed the pig of Qatar of his decision this week, telling him to hold back on any further terrorist support until called upon to resume.  If Obama is foolish enough to pour his final conventional military resources "down a rat hole," into a futile attempt to prevent the total "Islamist" takeover of Syria, then he will not only turn Syria into another quagmire "ala Bush," but he will very likely enable the Saudis and Qatar to establish the dreaded "Caliphate" that the right-wing is constantly crying about. 

I don't know about you, but I don't think that I can peacefully withstand another round of Imperialist war.]

by John J. Xenakis 

• Demonstrators in Jordan protest American troop presence
• Jordan’s King Abdullah and Obama meet to discuss Syria
• Sunni Jihadists pour into Syria

Demonstrators in Jordan protest American troop presence

Anti-American protesters in Amman, Jordan on Friday (Al-Monitor)

Last week, we reported that the U.S. announced the formal deployment of 200 troops to Jordan. The troops will be “ready for military action” if President Barack Obama were to order it. On Friday, Jordanians rallied against the deployment of the U.S. forces in Jordan. Demonstrators also burned a mock American flag. At the end of the demonstration, they gathered in a circle and danced, chanting about Ali Baba and the forty thieves. Al-Monitor

Jordan’s King Abdullah and Obama meet to discuss Syria

The question of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad continued to draw worldwide attention on Friday. President Barack Obama met with Jordan’s King Abdullah II in the White House and said that “a line has been crossed” in Syria.

He said, “To use weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations crosses another line in terms of international norms and laws… That’s going to be a game changer.” However, he declined to intervene militarily until a “vigorous investigation” had been completed to find more “direct evidence.”

However, Debka, which sometimes gets things wrong, is quoting its military intelligence sources as saying that the purpose of Obama’s meeting with Abdullah is to firm up an agreement for the U.S. to deploy a 20,000 troop “surge” into Jordan. The 200 troops announced last week are to lay the groundwork for the main body to take up quarters in the King Hussein Air Base Mafraq, near the borders of Iraq and Syria.

The purpose of the “surge” is to protect Jordan’s royal family both from jihadists from Syria and from an “Arab Spring” type revolt — a step that the Obama administration did not take with Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, or Yemen. The “surge” will be heavily coordinated with Israeli forces, and buffer zones will be set up on Syria’s borders to prevent attacks on both Jordan and Israel.

This “surge” comes at a time when thousands of fighters from Iran-backed Shia militias from Iraq and Hizbollah are aiding the al-Assad regime forces and are threatening to defeat the opposition rebels. The Hill and Debka

Sunni Jihadists pour into Syria

With thousands of fighters from Iran-backed Shia militias arriving in Syria to support al-Assad’s regime, it’s not surprising that thousands of Sunni jihadists are also arriving in Syria to fight the Shia militias. In particular, disaffected Muslims from Germany and elsewhere in Europe have been heading for Syria to receive training in weapons and terrorist techniques. German analysts are concerned that these fighters are gaining experience in Syria, making contacts, and will return to Germany and conduct terrorist attacks there. Spiegel

The West Masterminded Chechen War to Destroy USSR and Russia

[Armenia's unique history make it highly unlikely that an Armenian would convert to radical Wahhabi "Islam" (SEE: Did 'Misha' influence Tsarnaevs? In Watertown, doubts ).]

The West Masterminded Chechen War to Destroy USSR and Russia – June, 2010

 

It is now known that the twenty year old Islamic insurgency in the Caucasus (according to many experts an Al-Qaeda operation) and the arming of Georgia had been an integral part of a long-term Western plan to wrestle the northern Caucasus region away from Russian control and place it under what some experts refer to as an Islamic Caliphate. Ankara, Baku and Tbilisi, as well as a steady stream of Islamic militants trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan, were the active participants in this agenda throughout much of the 1990s. Its funding and organization was carried out by a consortium of special interests in Washington and London and, most probably, in Tel Aviv and Riyadh as well. It is also now known that Western intelligence agencies also conspired to force Russia out of the Balkans (Yugoslavia in particular) and Central Asia by targeting pro-Russian bastions in those regions.

As it has been since the early 1980s, radical Islam was always the readily accessible tool the West exploited to carryout its geopolitical agenda.

Why should this seemingly Russian problem concern us Armenians? Armenians in general, diasporans in particular, seem to be having a hard time accepting that a weakened Russia in the Caucasus poses a serious long-term threat for Armenia. Those amongst us that do not possess clearness of thought regarding this matter, I would just like to say that the Caucasus without an effective Russian presence would prove disastrous not only for Armenia but for the entire Eurasian continent. Joining three important geopolitical zones – Europe, Asia and the Middle East – the Caucasus region is the gateway to Russia’s vulnerable south, its soft underbelly. The region is also a major hub for the strategic transfer of Eurasian energy and trade. Strategic planners have long realized that those who are able to control this region could potentially impact much of Eurasia and beyond.

As we all know, the Caucasus is not a bastion of Christianity or western civilization. The heavily Turkic and Islamic cultural and ethnic makeup of the region in question would not tolerate a non-aligned, a non-Turkic or a non-Islamic power in their midst – without a major outside power acting as a guarantor or as a counter weight. Against this Islamic and Turkic center-of-gravity, the Russian presence has been the only counter-influence in the region for the past two hundred years. And it is precisely because of this geopolitical reality in the Caucasus that we Armenians have been able to establish nation-state.

It is quite frightening that unbeknownst to most Armenians, because our collective attention has naturally been drawn to the Caucasus region’s east-west geopolitical plane, the northern Caucasus was actually on the verge of a radical Islamic/Turkic transformation throughout much of the 1990s. There is no doubt today that had the northern Caucasus fell victim to this agenda it would have been the south’s turn not much long thereafter.

In short, without a Russian presence in the Caucasus, the region in question will eventually transform itself into a Turkic/Islamic cesspool; and not even a million of our “fedayees” would be able to stop it from happening.

Had Western intentions for the Caucasus succeeded not only would we Armenians be lamenting the lose of Nagorno Karabakh today we would most probably be lamenting the lose of our fledgling republic as well. Under such a geopolitical scenario for the region, a best case scenario for Armenia would have been if it simply become politically and economically subordinate to Ankara, Baku and Tbilisi.

Those who complain about Armenia’s current dependence on Moscow need to take this geopolitical prospect into serious consideration.

Although Vladimir Putin’s Russia succeeded in crushing the Islamic terror onslaught in the northern Caucasus in the early 2000s and managed to defeat the Western backed regime in Georgia in 2008, Moscow nevertheless realizes that a potential threat continues to remain in the region. As a result, as long as ethnic Russians run the show in the Kremlin, Moscow will do everything in its power to have a strong presence in the Caucasus. And needless to say, Armenia is pivotal to the Kremlin’s regional agenda. As a result of the major setbacks suffered by Islamists and the West, Ankara has more-or-less abandoned its pan-Turkic agenda in the Caucasus and Central Asia and is currently seeking to move closer to Moscow.

Nevertheless, despite Ankara’s best efforts to befriend the Bear, Turks continue to fear Russia’s resurgence.

The following video presentations and articles deal with this topic. Those interested in learning more about the Islamic insurgency in the Caucasus and the grave threat it posed to the entire Caucasus region should read the following book – Chechen Jihad: http://www.amazon.com/Chechen-Jihad-Qaedas-Training-Ground/dp/0060841702

Arevordi

Ruslan Tsarni Formerly Married To Daughter of CIA Official Graham Fuller

  Graham Fuller cia

Boston bombers’ uncle married daughter of top CIA official

MAD COW MORNING NEWS

  by Daniel Hopsicker

The uncle of the two suspected Boston bombers in last week’s attack, Ruslan Tsarni, was married to the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller

The discovery that Uncle Ruslan Tsarni had spy connections that go far deeper than had been previously known is ironic, especially since the mainstrean media’s focus yesterday was on a feverish search to find who might have recruited the Tsarnaev brothers.

The chief suspect was a red-haired Armenian exorcist.  They were fingering a suspect who may not, in fact, even exist.

It was like blaming one-armed hippies on acid for killing your wife.

 

Ruslan Tsarni married the daughter of former top CIA official 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.

What is known is that sometime in the early 1990’s, while she was a graduate student in North Carolina, and he was in law school at Duke, Ruslan Tsarnaev met and married Samantha Ankara Fuller, the daughter of Graham and Prudence Fuller of Rockville Maryland. Her middle name suggests a reference to one of her father’s CIA postings.

The couple divorced sometime before 2004.

Today Ms. Fuller lives abroad, and is a director of several companies pursuing strategies to increase energy production from clean-burning and renewable resources.

On a more ominous note, Graham Fuller was listed as one of the American Deep State rogues on Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery,. Edmonds explained it featured subjects of FBI investigations she became aware of during her time as an FBI translator.

Criminal activities were being protected by claims of State Secrets, she asserted. After Attorney General John Ashcroft went all the way to the Supreme Court to muzzle her under a little-used doctrine of State Secrets, she put up twenty-one photos, with no names.

One of them was Graham Fuller.

“Congress of Chechen International” c/o Graham Fuller

A story about a Chechen oik exec/uncle pairing up with a top CIA official who once served as CIA Station Chief in Kabul sounds like a pitch for a bad movie.

But the two men may have been in business together.

In 1995, Tsarnaev incorporated the Congress of Chechen International Organizations in Maryland, using as the address listed on incorporation documents 11114 Whisperwood Ln, in Rockville Maryland, the home address of his then-father-in-law.

It is just eight miles up the Washington National Pike from the Montgomery Village home where “Uncle Ruslan” met—and apparently wowed, the press after the attack in Boston.

The Washington Post yesterday called him a “media maven,” while nationally syndicated Washington Post columnist Ester Cepeda , in a piece with the headline “The Wise Words of Uncle Ruslan” opined that he was her choice for “an award for bravery in the face of adversity.”

Success through indirection, mis-direction, redirection, and protection

Uncle Ruslan’s spy connections go far deeper than was already known, which was that he spent two years working in Kazakhstan for USAID.

But the mainstream media was lookng the other way.

Under the headline “Did ‘Misha’ influence Tsarnaevs? In Watertown, doubts,” USA Today reported: “Misha. A new name has emerged in the Boston Marathon bombing case—one familiar to the family of the two young men accused of the atrocity and apparently of interest to the Russian and American security services as well.”

Ruslan Tsarni was the first to bring up the supposed man’s supposed name. Or rather, he brought up a first name:  Misha. But it was enough. We were off to the races…

Attention all cars: Be on lookout for chubby Armenian exorcist

Tsarni described Misha to CNN as being “chubby, a big guy, big mouth presenting himself with some kind of abilities as exorcist . . . having some part-time job in one of the stores, not married. All of the qualifications of a loser, just another big mouth.”

According to Uncle Ruslan, Misha was the man who over a considerable period of time had radicalized Tamerlan.

It seemed strange, then, that  in contrast to his “you are there” verbal picture of the man, even with all his supposed concerns, and given his high level of education and abundant resources (Big Sky Energy was paying him in excess of $200,00 a year, according to documents filed with the SEC) Ruslan had somehow never found out just who the bad guy was.

He never got a name, something that in spook-dom is considered something of a faux pas. Then again, no one else had either.

Worse, Tsarni’s vivid description seemed to be taken from personal observation, from, in other words…real life. But that isn’t possible. Tsarni had stated he hadn’t been physically in the presence of his Boston relatives since December 2005. And Misha, if he existed, didn’t show up on the scene until 2008 at the earliest.

Still,  just a few days later, the entire family began chiming in. Misha anecdotes were flying fast & furious, and the nation’s scribblers were busy uncritically scribbling down their every word.

Maybe their Twitter account got hacked again?

No performance was nearly as masterful, however, as that of the Associated Press.

“Bomb suspect influenced by mysterious radical,” reported the Associated Press.

“Tamerlan’s relationship with Misha could be a clue in understanding the motives behind his religious transformation and, ultimately, the attack itself,” reported the Associate Press. Only to take it all back in the very next line.

“Two U.S. officials say he had no tie to terrorist groups.”

The AP’s “story” about the mysterious “Misha” was 1145 words, long enough for an editor to squeeze in a caveat.

“It was not immediately clear whether the FBI has spoken to Misha or was attempting to,” the national wire service reported. “Efforts over several days by The Associated Press to identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful.”

The big difference: when you do it, its conspiracy theory. When we do it, its informed speculation.

In any other context, this might be seen as the rankest kind of “conspiracy theory.” But, apparently, when the Associated Press does it, its news.

Then Uncle Ruslan made a clear mis-step.

“An uncle of the alleged bombers claims that Misha, an Armenian convert to Islam, had a huge influence on the elder brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  Describing him as an “Armenia exorcist, Tsarni said, “Somehow he just took his brain.”

Armenians are a deeply-rooted Christian community, which is proud of the fact that their country was the first in the world to adopt Christianity as state religion in 301 AD.

Moreover this is the week every year when they remember the Armenian Holocaust, when as many as 1,000,000 Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish Muslims.

In the large and close-knit Boston Armenian community, a red-bearded Armenian named Misha becoming a radicalized Muslim would stand out.

“I’ve never heard of him, nor has anyone that I know,” Hilda Avedissian, executive director at the Armenian Cultural & Educational Centre.

So what if the guy was involved with biggest bank fraud in history?

“For an Armenian to convert to Islam is like finding a unicorn in a field,” Nerses Zurabyan, 32, an information technology director who lives in nearby Cambridge told USA Today.

The report reveals that the bomber’s Uncle, made famous for his outspoken condemnation of his nephew’s which aired repeatedly on international news networks, is a well-connected oil executive who at one point worked for a Halliburton shell company used as a front to obtain oil contracts from the Kazakh State.

Ruslon Tsarni was implicated in an investigation involving the laundering and theft of $6 billion. But everybody loves Uncle Ruslon. At least most of America’s mainstream media does.

There has, to date, been no speculation at all about whether an uncle of the men suspected of the bombing who had been involved in international intrigue at the hightest levels, and who married the daughter of a top CIA official, might warrant a closer look.

It’s enough, isn’t it, to turn even reasonably rational adults into—gasp!—conspiracy theorists.

“News,” someone once wrote, “is selection. And selection is always  based on an ideology and agenda, which is something to remember next time you watch, listen or read the ‘news.’”

Too true.

West/Saudis Pushing “al-CIA-da” Into Losing Battle With Hezbollah

[SEE:  Al-Qaida threatens Hezbollah over its support of the Syrian regime]

Pushing Al Qaeda to Take on Hezbollah

by FRANKLIN LAMB

Beirut

(Beirut) – “This is one damn fine idea, what took us so long to see a simple solution that was right in front of our eyes for Christ’s sake”, Senator John McCain of “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” and “no-fly zones for Syria” notoriety, reportedly demanded to know from Dennis Ross during a recent Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) brain storming session in Washington DC.

(Daniel Pipes, Photo:  left)

Ross, a founder of WINEP with Israeli government start up cash (presumably reimbursed unknowingly by American taxpayers) and currently WINEP’s “Counselor”, reportedly responded to the idea of facilitating Al Qeada to wage jihad against Hezbollah with the comment: “Shiites aren’t the only ones seeking death to demonstrate their ‘resistance’ to whatever. Plenty of other Muslims also want to die as we saw last week in Boston. Let ‘em all go at it and Israel can sweep out their s— when it’s over.”

One Congressional staffer attending the WINEP event emailed me, “Dennis spoke in jest — well I assumed he did — but who knows anymore? Things are getting ever crazier inside some of these pro-Israel think-tanks around here.”

Featured on the front page of its April 25 edition, the Zionist-compliant New York Times writes that the Assad regime is apparently recovering but, “it must be understood that for all of the justified worries about the (al Qaeda affiliated) rebels “Assad remains an ally of Iran and Hezbollah. “

The Times adopts the views of Islamophobe, Daniel Pipes, who recommends that the US try to keep the two sides in Syria fighting as long as possible until they destroy each other.  Pipes, now serving as an advisor to John McClain, wrote in the Washington Times on April 11, “Evil forces pose less danger to us when they make war on each other. This keeps them focused locally, and it prevents either one from emerging victorious and thereby posing a greater danger. Western powers should guide enemies to a stalemate by helping whichever side is losing, so as to prolong their debilitating conflict.”

Both Jeffrey Feltman, U.N. Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs and Susan Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N, have at a minimum impliedly joined in the intriguing idea of siccing Jabhat al Nusra on the Party of God. This scheme, if launched, would be Feltman’s 14th attempt to topple Hezbollah and defeat the Lebanese National Resistance to the occupation of Palestine since he first arrived in Beirut from Tel Aviv in 2005 to become US Ambassador to Lebanon.  This observer, among others in this region sense that given the aura still enveloping the American Embassy here,  that Jeffrey never really left his Lebanese ambassadorial post and continues to occupy this position from his new UN office.

This week Feltman warned that the spillover of Syria’s war continues to be felt in Lebanon as Susan Rice, echoed him and condemned Hezbollah for “undermining the country’s “dissociation policy.” The latter being a bit obscure in meaning but connoting something like sitting around doing nothing while this country is being shelled by jihadists from among the 23 countries currently fighting in Syria.  Feltman informed the media on 4/22/13 that “The Secretary-General is concerned by reports that Lebanese are fighting in Syria both on the side of the regime and on the side of the opposition, hopes that the new government will find ways to promote better compliance by all sides in Lebanon with the “disassociation policy.”

Given current divisions in Lebanon that will not happen anymore than Lebanon’s June 9th Parliamentary elections will be held on time.

For her part, Susan lectured the UN Security Council that “Hezbollah actively enables Assad to wage war on the Syrian people by providing money, weapons, and expertise to the regime in close coordination with Iran.” This position was expressed also through a statement by US. State Department spokesman , Patrick Ventrell, who said that Washington “has always been clear concerning Hezbollah’s shameful role and the support it is providing for the Syrian regime and the violence it is inducing in Syria.” Ventrell added: “We were clear from the start concerning the destructive role played by Iran as well as the Iranian role.”

Several Israeli agents in Congress are today promoting a Jabhat el Nusra-Hezbollah war even as the Obama administration terror-lists the jihadist group. Meanwhile, Senator Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), McCain’s neocon Islamaphobe acolyte, goes a bit further and explains to Fox News, once Assad falls and Hezbollah is out of the picture “We can deal with these (jihadist) fellas.”

Recent history in Libya instructs otherwise. As Turkish commentator Cihan Celik recently noted: “A divorce with al-Nusra will not be easy in Syria”

The past two years in Libya, that shadow of a country, reveals countless examples, three witnessed firsthand by this observer, during the long hot summer of 2011. What we saw was Gulf sponsors and funders offering young men, often unemployed, $ 100 per month, free cigarettes, and a Kalashnikov to do jihad.  Plenty down and out lads still accept these offers in Libya, as they do in Syria. One reason why the militias proliferated so quickly in Libya and never melted away was the phenomenon of a wannabe jihadists deciding to be a leader and recruiting perhaps a brother or two, maybe a few cousins or tribe members, and presto, they have created a militia with power they never dreamed of.

Their new life can offer many perceived benefits  from running rough shod over the civilian populations and setting up myriad mini but potent criminal enterprises specializing in kidnappings, robberies, drugs, trafficking in women, and assassinations for cash.  How many of these young men have turned in their weapons in Libya and returned to their former lives?   Or will do so when instructed by the likes of McCain or Graham?

On 4/24/13 Jabhat Al-Nusra Front intensified its threats to officials here including the Lebanese president by releasing a challenge from its media office: “…we inform you – and you may think of that as a warning or an ultimatum – that you must take immediate measures to restrain Hezbollah, otherwise, the fire will reach Beirut. If you do not abide by this within 24 hours, we will consider that you are taking part in the massacres committed by the Hezbollah members and we will unfortunately have to burn everything in Beirut.” In addition they are calling for Jihad and the establishment of the “Resistance Factions for Jihad against the Regime in Syria” and also in Saida and Tripoli, Lebanon.

Israeli officials appear to be in agreement with the Ross/Pipes proposal to arrange for Al Qeada to launch a war against Hezbollah.  The Director for External Affairs at “The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, repeatedly claimed that the Shia are the real threat to Israel, not the Sunni and with the least threat coming from the Gulf monarchs.  He offered the view recently that “Israel is now a partner of the Sunni Arab states.”  Indeed, Israel hopes that Hezbollah will forget Israel when tasked with trying repel Al Nusra and other al Qaeda affiliate attacks.

According to various Israel officials who have issued statements on the subject, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan and several other members of the Arab League constitute an “alliance of anxiety for Israel” because they claim that “Sunni Arabs are not as competent as the Shia and Iran and as a result they express doubts that Israel can rely on the Sunni states in the same way that the Sunni states can rely on Israel.”

In a documentary about the Iraq war, an American soldier explains:  “Actually, we don’t really have much of a problem with the Sunnis.  It’s the Shias who we are afraid of.  The problem has something to do with their leader who was killed centuries ago and these fellas are willing to lay their life down for the guy.  Anyhow, that is what they told us in Special Ops class.”

Al Nusra fighters currently occupying parts the south west areas of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in south Damascus, recently expressed eagerness to fight Hezbollah which they claim would give them credibility with Sunni Muslims and, oddly, in this observers view, “credibility with western countries”, who supposedly are al Qaeda’s sworn enemies. It’s sometimes hard to know who precisely is whose enemy these days in Syria as the rebels continue using areas east and southwest of Damascus as rear bases and as gateways into the capital.

Despite boasts to the contrary from Jihadist types in Syria and Lebanon, it is not clear to this observer if Jihadist and al Qaeda-affiliated groups living among Hezbollah communities in Lebanon like Fatah al Islam, Jund al Sham or Osbat al Ansar which have been here for years would actually join the Zionist promoted anti-Hezbollah jihad.

But it is evident that some Lebanese Islamists and jihadists directly connected to al Qaeda do have the ability to target Hezbollah.   Elements from each of these groups are startling to associate and identify with Jabhat al Nusra, inspired partly by their successful military operations in Syria.

Again, we saw the same thing in Libya.  Enthusiastic, ambitious young men who want to improve their lot in life try to go with a winner.  According to sources in the Ain al Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, jihadist leaders such as Haytham and Mohammed al Saadi, Tawfic Taha, Oussama al Shehabi and Majed al Majed are recruiting followers and fighters in Lebanon and offer a ticket out the the squalid army-surrounded, Syrian-refugee-inflated camp.

Homs-based media activist Mohammad Radwan Raad claims that “the embattled residents of the rebel-controlled Homs province town of Al-Qusayr welcome Saida, Lebanon-based Sunni Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir’s call for Jihad in Syria. Claims Raad, “Al-Qusayr residents welcome Assir’s call and hope the Lebanese people help kick out Hezbollah members in the area…We need anyone who can get rid of them.” This week Assir urged his followers to join Syrian rebels fighting troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah. Al-Qusayr has been under rebel control for more than a year and on the scene reports indicate that it is about to be returned to central government control.

In response, two Salafist Sunni Lebanese sheikhs urged their followers to go to Syria to fight a jihad (religious war) in defense of Qusayr’s Sunni residents. “There is a religious duty on every Muslim who is able to do so… to enter into Syria in order to defend its people, its mosques and religious shrines, especially in Qusayr and Homs,” Sheikh Ahmed al-Assir told his followers. For now, experts say, such calls on the part of Lebanon’s Salafists are largely bluster because the movement is far from able to wield either the arsenal or the fighting forces of Hezbollah.

Local analysts like Qassem Kassir argue that Jabhat al Nusra and friends are not organized enough to fight against Hezbollah in a conventional war, but they could cause great damage by organizing bomb attacks against the Party of God’s bases and militants. The latter would be enough initially for Ross and WINEP and their Zionist handlers. Creating chaos in Lebanon being one of their goals but more importantly weakening the National Lebanese Resistance led by Hezbollah and also challenging Syria and Iran.

In a recent speech, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah offered his party’s view about a Western-promoted Sunni-Shia clash, with Al-Nusra, AlQaida and all the groups which flocked to Syria, saying that what was wanted of them was to kill and get killed in Syria, in a massacre which will only serve the enemies of the Arabs and Muslims.

The coming months will reveal to us if  the several pro-Zionist Arab regimes as well as Islamophobes, including those at WINEP and other Israel-first think-tanks, are delusional in believing that John McCain’s “simple solution” to those resisting the Zionist occupation of Palestine, would be to assist  Jabhat el Nusra type jihadists to make war against Hezbollah.

Whether they could defeat Hezbollah is uncertain but whether Jabhat al Nusra and friends are capable of igniting yet another catastrophe in this region is the looming question.
   Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and Syria and is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and Syria and is reachable c/o
fplamb@gmail.com

Obama Keeps Resisting Zionist “Red Lines,” Tripwires, Forcing His Hand On Syria

[Both Zionist Central in London and that shitty little Zionist cesspool in the Middle East urge Obama to accept whatever "evidence" that they produce of any chemical weapons's use within Syria as proof that the "red lines" have been crossed, even if the lines were violated by the terrorist rebels, instead of by Assad (SEE:  'Growing evidence' of chemical weapons use in Syria - UK).  They have managed to recreate the same scenario within Syria that they almost pulled-off in Iran, with the help of different terrorist friends of America, the anti-Shia MEK/Jundullah.  Just as he refused to cave-in to previous Zionist pressure to launch an airborne aggression against Iran, he is apparently resisting pressure to cross the line which he has drawn in the sand with his own hand.  This doesn't mean to imply that he is secretly a good guy, but that he does not like it when other people try to force him to take unpleasant, ill-advised actions.  Don't read this as hope on my part that Obama will choose to do the right thing when the time comes, because I still firmly believe that he will not hesitate to push the "big red button" when the time comes, probably with a big smile on his lips.  He will be smiling  when he follows his master's order to unleash Armegeddon, pleased with himself for having ignored the hyped screams of the Apocalyptic cheerleaders like McCain, Cameron and Netanyahu.  Mistakes have been made by all of the team players who have misjudged the resiliency of Assad and the core strengths of the Lebanese resistance forces, but jumping the gun on WWIII will not improve the Empire's chances of success.  The time for the Greater Middle East War has passed, since the momentum for that war has been missed by both Bush and Obama.  Bush missed it on several occasions, after Afghanistan, after Iraq and after Israel failed in Lebanon in 2006, failing yet one more time, after the failed Georgian tangent in 2008.  Obama's big failure was in his hesitation in the early days of the anti-Syrian war.   Failure to jump on the war wagon there gave Russia time to turn the tables.  Odds are, the American/world economies will be fully depleted before Obama can organize another attempt, meaning that nothing has changed except for the American ability to control the flow of future events.  World War III will probably happen by accident, the way it should all go down.  Taking steps to avoid such an extinction-level event should by the number one priority with all earthly governments.]

White House: Obama’s red line not crossed on Syria chemical weapons

(CBS News) For the first time, the White House says chemical weapons have been used in Syria’s civil war. The Obama administration said it believes President Bashar Al-Assad used sarin gas on people last month. That report is leading some to ask if the U.S. is ready to consider military action.

The White House said the evidence of Syrian chemical weapons attacks is still too thin and President Obama’s red line has not been crossed, and that means military intervention by the United States in the Syrian civil war is not imminent and not guaranteed but more study and investigation is needed.

Syria has likely used chemical weapons on a “small scale,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday.Hagel was the first to confirm the startling news. He read from a prepared statement: “The Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.”

But Hagel, consistent with administration policy, laced his announcement with carefully crafted caveats. Hagel said, “We still have uncertainties about what was used, what kind of chemicals was used, where it was used, who used it.”

Secretary of State John Kerry told lawmakers that Syria used chemical weapons twice last month, once near Damascus and once in Aleppo. Victims appeared to have been gassed.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly said Syrian use of chemical weapons would cross a red line and could move the U.S. closer to military intervention in the Syrian civil war.

Mr. Obama said on Aug. 20, 2012, “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

But top White House advisers insist the red line has not been crossed. In letters to Congress, the administration said it needs more proof — in its words, “credible and corroborated facts.”

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has continuously pressed Mr. Obama to intervene, said the president is ducking his own standard. “The president of the United States said that this would be a red line if they used chemical weapons. The president of the United States has now told us that they used chemical weapons,” McCain said. “We must give the opposition the capability to drive out Bashar Assad once and for all.”

U.S. intelligence says it has “varying degrees of confidence” Syria used chemical weapons. But the U.S. isn’t the only nation hedging its bets. British intelligence says it has “persuasive information chemical weapons were used.” French intelligence says it has clues but no proof. However, CBS News’ Major Garrett reported, “Definitive proof may be very hard to find amid the raging Syrian civil war.”

© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Have You Ever Heard Of “Al-CIA-da” Attacking Iran?

[I, myself, have been one of the loudest voices in the past, protesting that "Al Qaeda is Sunni and hates Iran," but the longer this game goes on, the more I come to see that Shia Iran has been an ally of the real "al-CIA-da" all along.  After all, wasn't it Iran that supplied most of the first recruits from the Afghan mujahedeen to ship to Bosnia for Clinton? (SEE:  Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre).  Can anyone remember ever hearing of an "al-CIA-da" attack upon Iran, or Shiites, for that matter?  For Westerners to admit that previous murders and terrorist attacks have been committed by the same bunch of intelligence operatives that we normally would label "al-Qaeda" anywhere else, would be an admission of our own major guilt in international terrorism, or our ISI surrogates, or the Saudis. 

As far as the timely "al-CIA-da" plots to bomb trains in Canada, involving Iranian sources, anything is possible in this messed-up world    (SEE: Conservative anti-terror bill and arrests match up beautifully, don’t they: Mallick).  The big problem with this bit of terrorist news, which coincidentally supports currently debated Canadian anti-terror legislation, is that it is old news; the reported plot is at least one year old (dormant). Like all news concerning the terrorist phenomenon known as "al-CIA-da," it is all conveniently-timed hype, intended to ease the democratic transition into a total police state.  Canada is behaving like a good subservient government should act.  Ottawa is walking the rocky path to Fascism blazed by Cheney and Bush.]

“No attack was imminent and the tip was a year old.”

Iran’s unlikely Al Qaeda ties fluid, murky and deteriorating 

Reuters

Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri. — File photo

When Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri spoke in an audio message broadcast to supporters earlier this month, he had harsh words for Iran. Its true face, he said, had been unmasked by its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against fighters loyal to Al Qaeda.

Yet it is symptomatic of the peculiar relationship between Tehran and Al Qaeda that in the same month Canadian police would accuse “Al Qaeda elements in Iran” of backing a plot to derail a passenger train.

Shia Muslim Iran and strict Sunni militant group Al Qaeda are natural enemies on either side of the Muslim world’s great sectarian divide.

Yet intelligence veterans say that Iran, in pursuing its own ends, has in the past taken advantage of Al Qaeda fighters’ need to shelter or pass through its territory. It is a murky relationship that has been fluid and, say some in the intelligence community, has deteriorated in recent years.

“I wouldn’t even call it a marriage of convenience. It’s an association of convenience,” said Richard Barrett, former head of counter-terrorism for Britain’s MI6 Secret Intelligence Service and later head of the UN Security Council’s monitoring team maintaining the world body’s Al Qaeda and Taliban sanctions blacklists.

“It’s not a strategic alliance. An Al Qaeda presence may suit the Iranians because it allows them to keep an eye on them, it gives them leverage in the form of people who are akin to hostages,” he added.

“There has been a lot of travel between Iraq and Pakistan and I cannot imagine the Iranians are not aware of that,” he said. But it was unlikely that Iran would take the risk of actively collaborating with Al Qaeda against North America: “I don’t think the Iranians would take it kindly if it turned out that there had been plotting by Al Qaeda on their territory.”

Canadian police have said there was no sign the plot had been sponsored by the Iranian state. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Al Qaeda’s beliefs were in no way consistent with Tehran’s.

As yet, many details of the alleged plot remain unclear. However, a US government source cited a network of Al Qaeda fixers based in the Iranian city of Zahedan, close to the borders of both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The source said they served as go-betweens, travel agents and financial intermediaries for Al Qaeda operatives and cells operating in Pakistan and moving through the area.

Another Western source suggested that with relations deteriorating between Iran and Al Qaeda over the civil war in Syria, Tehran had acted recently to stop fighters crossing through from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) to join Islamist militants fighting to overthrow Assad.

“Although the relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda has always been strained, this worsened after 2011 when the two sides lined up on opposite sides in the Syrian civil war,” said Shashank Joshi, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London.

“Syria’s strongest rebel group is allied to Al Qaeda, and both have sharply criticised Iranian support for the Assad regime.”

It is unclear whether the planning for the alleged Canadian plot, which Canadian police said had been in the works for some time, was carried out before Syria’s war deepened the strain between Tehran and Al Qaeda.

“There has been a loosening of the ties,” said Barrett, noting that documents released after US forces caught and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 showed the Al Qaeda leader saying he was not able to trust the Iranians at all.

“Since then we have Zawahri castigating Iran quite recently. So clearly something had gone wrong.”

Iranian control far from clear

If indeed the Al Qaeda network was based in and around Zahedan — which lies on the main road to Pakistan and is the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province — it is far from clear how easy it would be for Iran to control.

The region is home to a toxic mix of drug smuggling, illicit trade and gun-running by insurgents. Afghan refugees long ago crowded into poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Zahedan, although Iran, like Pakistan, periodically tries to push them out, arguing they are a security risk.

Iranian authorities have also been battling a Sunni insurgency of their own in recent years by ethnic Baloch complaining of discrimination. The Jundollah group has claimed several attacks including a bombing that killed 42 people in 2009 — there is no sign it is linked to Al Qaeda, though it is often confused with a Pakistan-based group of the same name.

At the same time, on the Pakistan side of the border, Pakistani security forces are fighting an insurgency by secular Baloch separatists, while Al-Qaeda linked militants in the Sunni sectarian Lashkar-i-Jhangvi group have carried out a string of attacks against the Shia population there.

Pragmatic approach

Despite a common Western misconception that Iran, as the pre-eminent Shia power, is motivated by religion, it has always been much more pragmatic in pursuing its national interest, analysts and diplomats say, allowing it to turn a blind eye to Sunni Al Qaeda using its territory.

“The thing that has stymied people is that ‘Al Qaeda is Sunni and the rest of the people we are talking about here are Shia. They don’t mix and match.’ Well, they do. And they do it whenever they want to. They just look the other way,” said Nick Pratt, a retired US Marines colonel and CIA officer now with the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

Before the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Iran cooperated with India and Russia against the Pakistan-backed Taliban then in power in Kabul. When Al Qaeda members fled Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban, it detained them under house arrest in Tehran.

“Since 9/11 a number of senior Al Qaeda figures including one of Osama bin Laden’s sons and senior commander and strategist Saif al Adel made their way to Iran,” said Nigel Inkster, former director of operations for Britain’s MI6.

“They were detained under quite strict conditions by the Iranian authorities who subsequently sought to use them as a bargaining chip with the US government in their ongoing dispute about Iran’s nuclear program,” added Inkster, who is now director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Vahid Brown, a US-based researcher who has written extensively on Al Qaeda, said in an article on the Jihadica website earlier this year that the men who fled to Iran constituted a dissident faction within Al Qaeda, which in recent years had become increasingly vocal in their criticism of Osama and Zawahiri.

Divided by their views on the advisability of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, broadly speaking, “the pro-9/11 group, including bin Laden and Zawahiri, fled to Pakistan, while the anti-9/11 group ended up in Iran, where they were placed under house arrest by Iranian authorities,” he wrote.

Iran had been willing to cooperate with the United States on Afghanistan initially, but relations soured after Tehran was denounced by then President George W. Bush as part of the “axis of evil” in 2002 and worsened further after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Later, analysts say, Tehran allowed Al Qaeda members — among them Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — to transit through Iran.

But Iran has been vulnerable to Al Qaeda as well. After one of its diplomats was kidnapped in Pakistan some years ago it released some of the Al Qaeda members it had under house arrest in exchange for his freedom, according to Pakistani media reports.

“About 18 months ago the Iranians released most if not all of those they were holding, for reasons still not entirely clear,” said Inkster.

“There may well be a residual AQ presence in Iran though I would be cautious about presenting it as something very structured or hierarchic,” he added.

“AQ is far from being the organisation it once was and what matters more are relationships between like-minded individuals. And that may well be what we are seeing in the Canada case. There seems to be no evidence of Iranian official involvement.”

Riyadh Freaking-Out Over the Danger of International Criticism

MOJ calls for verifying info from sources

Abdulrahman Al-Ali

JEDDAH — The Kingdom is ready to provide anyone with accurate information about any legal or criminal issue that takes place on its territories, Justice Minister Dr. Muhammad Al-Issa told the European Parliament in Brussels during his lecture on Monday.

He said the principles of justice entail that any false information promoted by some sources should be ascertained first before making any judgments.

He stressed the importance of checking sources because they do not always have any material evidence that proves their claims.

Besides, they have ulterior motives and want to achieve certain goals, he claimed.

Any piece of information that does not have material evidence should not be believed, let alone used to make judgments about certain issues, Al-Issa added.

He asked the audience whether it was logical to make judgments about a certain issue based on a piece of information by some source.

Many times these pieces of information have proved to be inaccurate and in some cases made up, he said.

He said: “The Kingdom is an open book and does not have anything to hide.

“Its courts are based on legal transparent procedures.

“Anyone can attend court sessions that are held in the Kingdom.

“No one in this universe is perfect and we are part of this universe.

“No one wants others to convey false information about him.

“But if he conceals the truth, he should be rightly blamed by everyone.”

There is a distinct difference between freedom and chaos and violation of laws, the minister said.

Freedom stops when it violates laws and disrespects others and infringe upon their freedoms.

Al-Issa met with Elmar Brok, chairman of the European Parliament Committee on Foreign Affairs, who called on the minister to arrange open meetings with Saudi justice officials to discuss several issues and exchange opinions.

Al-Issa’s lecture focused on Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah’s program to develop the judicial system.

Afghan Massacre Trial On Hold Until the Pentagon Comes To Grips With Reality

[The Army trial of Staff Sgt Robert Bales of Ohio for the massacre of 16 Afghan civilians is in complete disarray.  The big point of contention is that "the Army is confused about how to deal with the issue of PTSD, formerly known as 'battle fatigue,' or 'shell shock."'  They consider it a disipline problem, men unwilling to grow-up on command."  The Big Brass are afraid to let this media trial proceed, if it will expose the shockingly cruel callous Pentagon culture of "machismo," which refuses to believe in or to accept the concept of "post-traumatic stress disorder."  It is the macho delusion that this Army possesses superhuman capabilities, which prevents its generals from accepting the high toll that their polices have exacted upon American personnel (SEE: Army Shuts-Down Unmanly “New Agey” Therapy At Madigan Army Center ).  This delusional mindset led America directly into a quagmire, before the first forces were ever deployed, because the Generals pretended that their "all-volunteer force" was sufficient to fight two full-scale ground wars, even though the volunteer force could not supply sufficient manpower for one major war, without calling-out all of the reserves.  

Staff Sgt. Bales did not want to deploy to Afghanistan, after serving three tours in Iraq.  If anybody ever had a reason to suffer traumatic stress, it was Sgt. Bales and every other overworked soldier like him.  Just like the case of My Lai and Lt. William Calley, how could they be faulted for civilian massacres, when they saw similar slaugter taking place everyday?  As far as they knew, they were just being "gung ho" in the service of their country.  Gooks, towelheads, Chincs, Japs, these are all derogatory racial epethets which were supplied by the Pentagon chain of command to the men on the front lines.  Killing as many of them as possible, has always been the soldiers' primary mission.]

Defense seeks new expert in Afghan killings case

Attorneys for the U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians during a 2012 rampage have asked that a new psychiatric expert be appointed in the case.

By GENE JOHNSON

Associated Press

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. —

Attorneys for the U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians during a 2012 rampage have asked that a new psychiatric expert be appointed in the case.

Emma Scanlan, an attorney for Robert Bales, made the request during a hearing Tuesday at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle.

Citing attorney-client privilege, Scanlan did not say why the request was made. The defense team provided its reasons to the judge – but not prosecutors – in a confidential court filing.

Prosecutors objected to the motion, saying it smacked of witness shopping.

Outside experts believe a key issue going forward will be to determine if Bales suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Bales served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A ruling on the defense team’s request will be made later.

At Tuesday’s hearing, attorneys also discussed which witnesses might be allowed to testify on Bales’ behalf, should the case reach a sentencing phase.

Defense attorneys also asked for a consultant to be appointed to help them pick jurors. The judge said he would rule on that later.

The defense also requested the handwritten notes of the first Afghan government officials who viewed the crime scene.

The defense team has received an official report about those findings, but lawyers said the notes could yield information left out of the report. Prosecutors said they so far have been unable to obtain the notes from the Afghans. At the judge’s request, they agreed to make another attempt through official channels.

“They took a lot of notes, and that’s what we want to see,” Major Greg Malson, one of Bales’ attorney, said after the hearing.

Bales is to be court-martialed on premeditated murder and other charges in the attack on two villages in southern Afghanistan.

The Ohio native and father of two is accused of slaying mostly women and children during pre-dawn raids on March 11, 2012.

Bales, 39, has not entered a plea. The Army is seeking the death penalty. The U.S. military has not executed anyone since 1961.

The slayings last year drew such angry protests that the U.S. temporarily halted combat operations in Afghanistan, and it was three weeks before American investigators could reach the crime scenes.

Bales’ defense team has said the government’s case is incomplete.

During a previous preliminary hearing, prosecutors built a strong eyewitness case against the veteran soldier, with troops recounting how they saw Bales return to the base alone, covered in blood. One soldier testified that Bales woke him up in the middle of the night, saying he had just shot people at one village and that he was heading out again to attack another. The soldier said he didn’t believe Bales and went back to sleep.

Afghan witnesses questioned via a video link from a forward operating base near Kandahar City described the horror of that night. A teenage boy recalled how the gunman kept firing as youths scrambled, yelling: “We are children! We are children!”

An Army criminal investigations command special agent testified earlier that Bales tested positive for steroids three days after the killings, and other soldiers testified that Bales had been drinking the evening of the massacre.

Canada Conforms To US Puppet Status, Hyping “al-Qaeda Train Plot” Before Emergency Debate On Anti Terrorism Bill

Canadians react to RCMP terror plot takedown

“Timing of this news release a coincidence? On the Monday when Harper wants to have an emergency debate on the Anti Terrorism Bill?” wrote CBCNews.ca reader ruthbl.

 

Agreeing, PattyCakes1234 on our story about the bill that “this is a pure scare tactic to take away our rights. The recent ‘alleged’ terror plot, I believe is just fear mongering. How convenient that the arrests occurred the day before the possible vote of the terrorism bill proposed by the conservatives.”

A Stephen Harper parody account weighed in on Twitter to the same effect. Not Steve Harper @pmoharper I’d like to thank the RCMP for detaining terror suspects the very same day my govt suddenly debates new terror laws.

As did several others.

William Gibson @GreatDismal Tories hoping to pass new anti-terrorism bill today, so timing of RCMP/CSIS presser on alleged plot a bit tacky.

Sana Saeed @SanaSaeed Bill S-7 authorizes pre-emptive detention of Canadians for up to 3 days without charge. RCMP arrested two men pre-emptively today. Um.

min reyes @Min_Reyes arrests were made today, the same day Bill S7 is to be debated… while suspects have been under surveillance for over a year.

Others were simply confused by the seemingly unusual circumstances.

“What is meant by “al Qaeda elements in Iran” exactly?” wrote CBCNews.ca reader awalli. “Most should know by now that al Qaeda is rooted in the Salafist movement, primarily out of Saudi Arabia, and are arch-enemies of the majority Itna Asharis of Iran. In large part, they don’t even speak the same language.”

As a militant Salafist Islamic movement, al-Qaeda preaches a radical anti-Shia ideology that places it firmly at odds with Shia Iran, according to BBC News Persian correspondent Mohammad Manzarpour.

Canadians react to RCMP terror plot takedown

 

by Lauren O’Neil

 

1. Canadians are full of questions today after the RCMP’s announcement that two men have been arrested in a connection with a thwarted terrorist attack involving a Via passenger train in the Greater Toronto Area.
2. Alleged terror plot thwarted by arrests in Ontario, Quebec – Politics – CBC News

   Greg Weston National Affairs Specialist Police have made a number of arrests in southern Ontario and Quebec following a joint operation b…
3. In a press conference Monday afternoon, Canadian police  accused two men — identified as Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, of Montreal, and Raed Jaser, 35, from Toronto — of conspiring to commit an “al-Qaeda-supported ” attack.
    

   Police said the two accused were getting “direction and guidance” from al-Qaeda elements in Iran, but also noted that there was no information to suggest the attacks were state sponsored.

   In the moments following the RCMP’s announcement, many online expressed shock, relief, and gratitude towards investigators for halting the attack before it could take place.

Gen. Kayani Speaks Fondly of Radical Islamist Militarism

Obsessive focus: Gen Kayani’s comments

PERHAPS it is a sign of the times that Gen Kayani’s comments at the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul will attract little meaningful attention or comment. “Pakistan was created in the name of Islam and Islam can never be taken out of Pakistan … The Pakistan Army will keep on doing its best towards our common dream for a truly Islamic Republic of Pakistan,” Gen Kayani said. In truth, however, both the timing and the content of Gen Kayani’s speech ought to be parsed carefully. Given the recent travails of election candidates facing new, and unwarranted, scrutiny of their Islamic credentials and a debate being triggered on the true ideology of Pakistan, the army chief ought to have considered whether weighing in on such matters at this time was the appropriate thing to do or not. The political battle lines have already been drawn, with religious elements and anti-democratic forces beating the drum of an exclusionist version of Pakistan’s ideology and trying to make it an election issue. Has Gen Kayani, wittingly or unwittingly, given those religious elements and anti-democratic forces a boost going into next month’s election?

The substance too of the comments requires close examination. Who is trying to take Islam out of Pakistan; where is the threat to the public’s right to practise their Muslim faith? In fact, the threat is in the opposite direction: to those of other faiths who are also Pakistani and some of whom don’t even enjoy the theoretical right to practise their faith without fear or intimidation. If Islam is in fact the core of the Pakistani state, does that mean non-Muslim Pakistanis have no place in this state and society? Even among Muslims, from the early 1950s, the question of which of the many different interpretations of and schools of thought in Islam ought to be given precedence over the rest has been a dangerously divisive issue when the state has seen fit on occasion to tackle it. More relevantly to Gen Kayani’s institution, the exclusive, obsessive even, focus on using Islam to galvanise the armed forces is precisely where the origins of the tragic and disastrous policy of state-sponsored jihad has arisen. Gen Kayani and the army high command should stick to questions of national security and leave it to the politicians to sort out for whom and why Pakistan was created. The ideology of Pakistan should be an issue for politics, not the armed forces.

The Saudi Connection To Chechen Islamists

[Wahhabism, Ibn al-Khattab...This is a CIA attempt to rewrite the anti-terrorist narrative, right before our eyes.  We need new terrorist bogeyman, since the Afghan/Pakistani strain of Jihadism is a spent force (most of the memorable terrorists have already been popularized in America'a other "jihads," or they have been eulogized after being killed once or twice in Predator strikes.  We need new "bad guys," so the Wahhabis have produced some for us (SEE: If the Script Calls for Credible “Bad Guys,” Then Invent Some!).  The real problem with these new "Islamist" straw men and with the previous ones, is the Saudi connection.  How des the CIA manage to get two Chechen brothers to kill innocent Americans, and thereby implicate a whole new branch of Wahhabi terrorism without implicating the Saudis? 

The list of Saudi anti-American crimes has grown larger than our capacity for forgiveness.  Since 2001, Americans have stood silent, with their jaws dropped open in disbelief, as one Saudi after another is secreted out of the country under cover of a media blackout, followed by a whitewashing of any wrongdoing or court record documenting it.  If the  CIA command to kill Americans came from Saudi Arabia (even if those commands came in the form of subliminal hypnotic suggestions), then all America will rise-up against the desert kingdom, speaking with one voice, holding high the same clenched right fist.  Even if the CIA is untouchable, Saudi Arabia will be introduced to the infamous "dust bin of history."

According to SLATE, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had his own YouTube site.  He posted videos of a Saudi preacher reciting parts of the Quran. 

It is done with some sort of echo effect, making it sound like the infamous “Juba the sniper” video.  The hypnotic quality of this effect is inescapable to anyone who listens to one of the recitations.  Tsarnaev also posts an Al-Qaeda video of Khorasan, The Emergence of Prophecy: The Black Flags From Khorasan.  Khorasan is allegedly the “al-CIA-da” name for the region from Afghanistan to Central Asia, the site of the first battle won against the Anti-Christ by the jihadi forces of the new Mahdi. 

The emir of “al-CIA-da” in Chechnya was Ibn al-Khattab.  He was a Saudi of Chechen heritage from the Jordanian border region.  There, al-Khattab (whose desire was to study in America, according to his brother) was recruited for higher education of unknown content by Aramco, the Saudi oil giant.  The first suspect in the marathon bombings was a Saudi, Abdul Rahman Ali-Alharbi.  Al-Alharbi has alleged links to “al-Qaeda.”   If this Saudi can be linked to the Tsarnaev brothers, even if there is a photo of them standing near each other in Boston, then it might be the nail in the Saudis’ coffin, or at least the match that will light the fuse on the Islamist powderkeg which they have chosen to sit upon.]

Khattabs real name is Samir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem.

The Saudi connection linking the Boston Marathon to September 11 

Albeit the dimensions are somewhat smaller, but the pain, fear, and anger are the same. America has again been caught off guard by foreign terrorists seeking to sow destruction and death.

By Ksenia Svetlova

Emergency workers aid injured people at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon following an explosion in Boston, Monday, April 15, 2013. Photo by AP

Almost 12 years have passed since that “great tragedy,” the attacks of September 11, and the United States has yet again experienced a national tragedy. Albeit the dimensions are somewhat smaller, but the pain, fear, and anger are the same. America has again been caught off guard by foreign terrorists seeking to sow destruction and death.

In September 2001 the terrorists were Saudis (15 out of 19) and Egyptian. This time, the culprits where to Chechen brothers, Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev. If it turns out that their motivations were religious, the context of their country of origin will not be coincidental. Until now there has not been any testament from the two, neither written nor filmed – which is generally common practice in the case of such attacks – nor has there been any claim of responsibility from Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri. Al-Qaida also tends to take responsibility for attacks to which it was unconnected at the operational level, if it shares an ideological bond with those responsible. Despite this, it is very likely that there is a strong, ideological and operational connection between the attacks of 2001 and 2013.

Back in the early nineties, Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan became a stronghold in the Caucasus region for the radical stream of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism. Mosques and madrasas were opened; training camps for young combatants were established to prepare them for the “jihad against the infidels.” Until this day, the teachings of Said Buryatsky, a charismatic, Wahhabist radical, are among the most downloaded files in Chechnya.

This radical Islamist movement was founded in the Arabian Peninsula and adopted by tribes that founded a kingdom in the 18 century, which later became Saudi Arabia. This puritan, aggressive movement is considered by orthodox Muslims as heretic. Many approached it with suspicion and rejected it, but the situation changed once the “black gold” began to flow from Saudi Arabia’s soil. Thus the Wahhabists gained their much-wanted recognition, and began to send money to religious institutions around the world, including in Chechnya and Dagestan.

In addition to the money that began to emanate from Saudi Arabia in the late 1980’s, “preachers” began to travel the world as well. Scholars, religious figures, and jihadist combatants, trained in battles against the Soviets began to spread. One of them was Ibn al-Khattab, the well-known military commander of Saudi-Jordanian descent, who was killed by Russian forces in March 2002.

The spread of Wahhabism in Chechnya sparked a great deal of opposition within the local society, the strong ideals of which contradicted the traditional Islam practiced in the area, as well as the way of life in Chechnya and Dagestan. Fierce battles and political conflicts ensued in the 1990’s, and continued after the war in Chechnya. The institutionalization of Wahhabism in Chechnya happened not without a significant amount of force, as its supporters fought both the Chechnyans and the Russians. Despite the efforts of current Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov to prevent his capital Grozny from becoming the “Dubai of the Caucasus,” the Wahhabist extremism attracts many youths from Chechnya and Dagestan.

Only recently, video clips were published featuring Chechen jihadists that traveled to Syria to fighting against President Bashar Assad’s regime. Kadyrov came out with a statement that “no Chechen is fighting in Syria,” later altering his statement by claiming that those fighting in Syria were mercenaries.

The extremist propaganda is functioning as always, and a new generation in Chechnya has grown up with conflict and propaganda. This generation is attracted to the simple ideological base of Wahhabism, and to the murderous romance of the jihad its leaders are calling for. The members of this new generation go to Syria and Iraq. Some of them maybe go to the U.S. and other places in the world in order to join the “army of believers,” according to them. It is not impossible to rule out that the Saudis who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the brothers from Chechnya who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon subscribed to the same radical Wahhabist ideology.

Immediately after reports were published that the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were of Chechen origin, Kadyrov tweeted that “terror has no nationality.” Currently, his followers in Chechnya and Ingushetia will once again have to “deal with” the Wahhabist problem in Russia’s backyard. The question is if even a leader as powerful as Kadyrov can dismantle the Wahhabist institution fostering in the Caucasus for decades, receiving monetary and ideological support from Riyadh.

Ksenia Svetlova is a writer and analyst on Arab affairs for Channel 9, and has a doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Middle Eastern Studies.

The Absolute Worst Kind of Terrorists Attack Hospitals and Schools

Suicide attack at Bajaur hospital kills four

Zahir Shah Sherazi

PESHAWAR: At least four people were killed Saturday when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives outside a hospital in Bajaur tribal region, officials said.

Administration officials, requesting not to be named, confirmed the suicide bomber walked on foot to the main gate of the agency headquarters hospital in Khar tehsil of Bajaur agency and blew up his suicide vest.

The dead included security personnel. Four other people were also injured.

Officials the bomber apparently targeted security men guarding the hospital.

Two approaches to fighting terrorism

Irfan Husain

IN Boston, three people were killed in an act of terrorism earlier this week, and it’s still headline news in the United States. President Obama has denounced the attack, and an FBI official has promised to hunt the perpetrator to “the ends of the earth”.

In Pakistan, a terrorist attack that claimed “only” three lives would probably be buried on page three of our national newspapers. As for the search for the killers, we’d be lucky if the police even registered the case.

Why this difference in approach to terrorism? The reason lies in the seriousness with which the two states take their primary duty of protecting their citizens.

In the United States, the intelligence failures that permitted 9/11 to occur prompted American leaders to ratchet up security, change laws and become highly proactive in fighting the scourge of terrorism.

Undoubtedly, these steps, taken under the Homeland Security Act of 2002, have eroded personal liberties and human rights. But it is a fact that the Boston bombing was the first successful act of terrorism after 9/11, apart from the Fort Hood shootings by Major Nidal Hasan in 2009.

In a number of sting operations, the FBI and local police have entrapped a number of suspects — usually Muslim — who agreed to participate in bizarre attacks.

Through wiretaps on telephone conversations and email intercepts, American intelligence agencies have disrupted a number of terrorist plots.

As a result of this vigilance, terrorism in the US has virtually been stamped out. It is precisely because of this success that the Boston attack has caused so much fear and outrage.

Compare this muscular, no-nonsense approach with Pakistan’s hopelessly inadequate response to terrorism.

For over two decades, Pakistanis have suffered from murderous attacks from a lethal brew of gangs killing and maiming in the name of Islam. Frequently, these criminals boast of their deeds, and post videos of beheadings on the internet.

Almost invariably, the state is a mute onlooker. Intelligence agencies are either incompetent or occasionally collusive. While brave but ill-trained and poorly equipped policemen, militiamen and soldiers have died in their thousands, politicians and generals have been unable to get their act together.

Despite the heavy casualties suffered in this vicious war, Rehman Malik, our ex-interior minister, can still pass the buck to provincial governments in the wake of the atrocities Shias have been subjected to recently.

In the US, the FBI has primary jurisdiction over all cases involving terrorism. In Pakistan, we have been unable to create a federal force along the same lines.

The result is a mishmash of agencies, ranging from covert military outfits to the Intelligence Bureau to local police who arrive at the scene of terrorist acts.

With little coordination, it should not surprise us if investigations seldom lead anywhere.

And when a suspect is actually arrested, even with illegal arms in his possession, he is likely to be let off by our courts. Witnesses are scared of reprisals, and judges terrified of the consequences of a guilty verdict. The result is before us in the shape of an increasingly violent jihadi insurgency.

When faced with a major threat to their sovereignty and to their citizens, states normally respond with force. Pakistan’s response to the existential threat we face has been equivocal and half-hearted. While our army and paramilitary units have fought bravely when called upon to do so, both our military and political leadership has been ambiguous and confused.

There has been talk of an elusive consensus at GHQ and the presidency. But leadership is about forging a consensus and taking the nation along in difficult decisions, not heeding divided counsel.

As we have seen in the ongoing Taliban campaign of targeting candidates in next month’s elections, there are wide variations in how these killers are viewed by different political parties. The Taliban, too, differentiate between parties: witness their threats against candidates from the PPP, the MQM and the ANP, all mainstream secular parties.

Clearly, apart from the religious parties, PML-N and PTI are both acceptable to the Taliban and their ilk. This is one reason our politicians have been unable to unite on a single platform and condemn these killers in unequivocal terms.

In other countries, any political party seeming to side with terrorists, or seeking their support, would pay a heavy price at the polls.

Not so in Pakistan. This reveals the confusion among people that has been sowed by politicians and the media. People like Imran Khan have been pretending that Islamic militancy is the result of the US-led war against Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. By blaming the Americans and their drone campaign, our leaders absolve the Pakistani Taliban of their vicious crimes.

Elsewhere, no politician can get away with letting terrorists off the hook by saying their violence is motivated by extraneous factors. But by using terrorists for their own ends in Kashmir and Afghanistan, the Pakistani establishment is reaping what it sowed. Over the years, various jihadi groups have gained legitimacy as well as support in our intelligence agencies.

Another reason for their growing self-confidence and success is the increasingly fanatical tilt in Pakistan’s public discourse.

Fuelled by a reactionary electronic media that demonises all things Western and openly justifies extremism, the deadly virus of Islamist violence grows ever more virulent.

No other country has provided as much space to terrorism as Pakistan has, and no other country has suffered as much as we have.

And yet, we continue to grope in the dark, unable to evolve a consensus or forge a strategy to confront and defeat the jihadi monsters we have ourselves unleashed.

irfan.husain@gmail.com

Hamid Karzai Seeks To Curb Illegal CIA Militia Operations In Afghanistan

Hamid Karzai seeks to curb CIA operations in Afghanistan

President believes battle in which 10 children and a US agent died was fought by illegal militia working for spy agency

• Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul

Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s campaign against CIA operations sets up a heated showdown with the US government. Photograph: S Sabawoon/EPA

President Hamid Karzai is determined to curb CIA operations in Afghanistan after the death of a US agent and 10 Afghan children in a battle he believes was fought by an illegal militia working for the US spy agency.

The campaign sets the Afghan leader up for another heated showdown with the US government, and will reignite questions about the CIA’s extensive but highly secretive operations in the country.

Karzai’s spokesman Aimal Faizi said the CIA controlled large commando-like units, some of whom operated under the nominal stamp of the Afghan government’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), but were not actually under its control.

“Some of them are said to be working with the NDS, but they are not armed by the NDS, not paid by the NDS, and not sent to operations by the NDS. Sometimes they only inform the NDS minutes before the operation,” Faizi said. “They are conducting operations without informing local authorities and when something goes wrong it is called a joint operation.”

One of these groups was involved in a battle with insurgents in a remote corner of eastern Kunar province in early April that left several Afghan children dead, Faizi said. Karzai has fired the provincial head of intelligence in connection with the incident.

The US citizen who died during the battle was advising the Afghan intelligence service, and the airstrike that killed the children is believed to have been called in after he was fatally injured.

The US embassy declined to comment on CIA issues, but sources with knowledge of the battle said he was an agent, and his name has not been released, usually an indication of intelligence work.

Bob Woodward in his 2010 book Obama’s Wars described a 3,000-strong Afghan militia working for the CIA, and Faizi said the Afghan government had little information about the teams. “There is a lack of clarity about their numbers and movement,” he said when asked how many men the CIA had on their payroll, or where these large teams might be based.

Woodward said the unofficial commando units were known as counter-terrorism pursuit teams, and described them as “a paid, trained and functioning tool of the CIA”, authorised by President George W Bush.

They were sent on operations to kill or capture insurgent leaders, but also went into lawless areas to try to pacify them and win support for the Afghan government and its foreign backers. Woodward said the units even conducted cross-border raids into Pakistan.

In the wake of the Kunar battle, Karzai has also ordered his security officials to step up implementation of a presidential decree issued in late February abolishing “parallel structures”. Faizi said this order was aimed primarily at dismantling CIA-controlled teams.

“The use of these parallel structures run by the CIA and US special forces is an issue of concern for the Afghan people and the Afghan government,” he said.

For Karzai the move is another step towards reasserting Afghan sovereignty, part of a long campaign waged against US forces and their allies. He has already won control of the main US-run prison in the country, and ended unilateral night raids on insurgent hideouts that coalition commanders once described as critical to the war.

But Karzai’s move comes at a critical time for an already volatile relationship, when Washington and Kabul are trying to negotiate what, if any, military presence the US will have in Afghanistan beyond 2014, and curbing the CIA’s reach could strike at the heart of US strategic interests there.

Barack Obama has been clear that the US does not plan to fight the Taliban after next year. Instead some foreign troops will train Afghan soldiers to fight the insurgency while US special forces pursue groups such as al-Qaida hiding along the lawless border with Pakistan.

While the US is expected to keep a few thousand soldiers in Afghanistan, bolstered by troops from Nato allies, Obama has also made clear there is “zero option” of a complete US withdrawal, as happened in Iraq.

 

Photos of Military-Looking Suspects Photographed Carrying Backpacks Before Detonations At Boston Marathon

Excellent source of Boston Bombing photos: 

4chan ThinkTank 

 

Interview With Syrian President Bashar al-Assad–(4-18-2013)

The situation in Syria is better than the beginning of the crisis Great Syrian people do not worry him April 18, 2013 Damascus, (SANA) - Mr. President Bashar al-Assad in an interview with Channel News Syrian about the risks to Syria from global war and developments in the region, we need much more to hold on to the sense of Galaa and meanings of independence to be a holiday Galaa for us past glory and present dignity, pointing out that Syria is exposed to try to colonize new all means and various ways. President al-Assad said .. There are major powers, particularly the Western powers led by the United States historically does not accept that there are countries that have autonomy, even in Europe, how the third world countries. President al-Assad stressed that the Syrian people are a great people do not concern him, and draw optimism from the citizens and particularly the powerful families of martyrs and there is no option we have only a victory, pointing out that the situation in Syria now is better than the beginning of the crisis. President al-Assad pointed out that Erdogan is ready to give all his country against himself, pointing to the losses suffered by the politically inside Turkey against the backdrop of the failure of the so-called policy of zero problems, which turned into a zero policy and zero friends and zero ethics. Kerry’s visit to the region President al-Assad stressed that this shows that the external factor is a key factor in what is happening in Syria since the first day and that whenever we have achieved successes will see a further escalation. President al-Assad said that it is not possible to believe that thousands walk in with their equipment to Syria from Jordan in the time that Jordan was able to stop or arrest a person carrying a weapon one simple resistance in Palestine over the past years. The following is the full text of the interview: Question .. We live festival atmosphere Galaa .. What would you like to Tugeoh of the Syrian people in so on, especially in light of what is going through Syria from the events … Mr. President: It is axiomatic that connects holiday Galaa the withdrawal of foreign troops from any country but the first question we ask in such circumstances and in the Arab general conditions that preceded this crisis .. What if I came out colonizer and took with him the sovereignty and decision … No value to evacuate .. Independence real real Galaa is when Wigley colonized about the land and restore sovereignty with all means of the word meanings .. If there is an occupied land but its people free is much better than that we have liberated land and the people of loss of sovereignty and state devoid of national decision .. So you must understand Galaa and independence .. Galaa and independence in its comprehensive sense .. I think that Syria is in such circumstances are to try new colonization by all means and in different ways .. There is an attempt to invade Syria come from outside forces of different nationalities if they follow a new tactic differs from the traditional tactic of colonization, which we used to call modern colonialism that had come marching into the region and the end of the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan .. There is also an attempt to occupy Syria of cross-cultural point of a two-way intellectual invasion .. Either for Syria to go toward subordination and submission of major powers and the West in particular or the other direction, which undergo forces of obscurantism takfirist. We need much more to hold on Galaa words and meanings of independence I think that on this occasion we need much more to hold on to the sense of Galaa and meanings independence .. Since we were children he meant to us this holiday a lot of pride .. Today should remain this site and rise to be holiday Galaa for us the past glory and present dignity. Question .. Mr. President .. Mention what is going through Syria situations .. Events have evolved in this country from the crisis passed security events and then what Smeetmoh once you say about that war .. Today is exactly what is happening in Syria how Tocefh … Mr. President: In fact what is happening is a war .. It is not a security events .. Perhaps appeared initially in the form of security incidents and some still deal with it until this moment, raises questions and assessments through the fact that what is happening is the security incidents. The truth is war all carry this sense of the word .. There is a major power and specifically the Western powers led by the United States historically does not accept that there be countries that have autonomy, even in Europe .. Europe wants submissive how third world countries .. How small countries … Must be submissive to work for the interests of those countries. At the same time Syria is in a very important geopolitical desire to control Syria is also something historic and traditional policy of the colonial powers .. These countries play a role in this battle through the provision of political and public support in the beginning. There are a group of mercenaries that take money from abroad for certain acts of sabotage And recently moved publicly to provide material and logistical support and we believe that they support them also in the field of armaments. There are countries that regional Arab and non-Arab countries such as Turkey, for example .. These countries, sold and bought a lot and created a position for itself on the Arab and Islamic arena through virtual support for the Palestinian cause and it seems that this role has gone too far in excess of what is allowed by the Masters .. Any major countries was not necessary to undo this role .. Here transparent Syrian role towards various issues, including the Palestinian issue, including the issue of the rights and dignity exposes these countries .. Survival of the Syrian role as embarrassing to them .. It has become the Syrian issue, the Syrian issue, or a matter of the Syrian crisis to embarrass them and a matter of life or death in political terms for these countries Vzjoa the all their strength in order to hit Syria and tons and people. There are internal factors .. There are a group of thieves .. There are a group of mercenaries that take money from abroad for certain acts of sabotage .. And there التكفيريون or rule or Front victory .. All of them fall under the umbrella of an intellectual one. What is happening now is that we are facing mainly powers takfirist Indeed, what is happening now we are faced with basically those expiatory forces .. The first and second elements are practically wounded too harsh strikes Either they ended up in some places, or they have moved forcibly to work under the umbrella of al-Qaeda against their will in order to be part of it .. Fmili We now fight takfir powers. Question .. For as long as you have said, Mr. President, that Syria has become an embarrassment .. They always find new and Tra to it يعزفوا whenever they fail to stage .. Now is a lot of talk about that Syria witnessing sectarian اقتتالا and perhaps ideologically and other phenomena occur here and there .. Frankly .. Mr. President .. Are not you afraid of becoming sectarian sometimes rears its head in Syria .. Mr. President: In every society there are groups of people who carry intellectually limited and narrow horizon and carry a weak sense of national .. These groups appear in all the crises .. Appear on arena Pfla and performance harmful .. May not be detrimental to the broad level but appear in the form of spots .. This is what happened in Syria in the eighties during the crisis of the Muslim Brotherhood, who also used the sectarian thought in spite of the lack of Internet and satellite TV at that time .. Nevertheless managed to marketing thought and sectarian appeared those spots .. But when you defeat the Muslim Brotherhood returned the situation in Syria to the nature of the Syrian society. Syrian people is a great people do not concern it The only thing that bet in this case is the awareness of the people .. And the Syrian people actually proved unprecedented during the two years that the people of conscious .. Otherwise, we would have seen a very different situation in Syria so if entered directly to the answer to the question that I can say without exaggeration that the situation in Syria now better than in the beginning of the crisis .. In the beginning of the crisis use sectarian rhetoric and appeared Albur strongly and there was concern and loss of balance among many on this point .. With time there has been an increase in awareness of the dangers of what is happening and understanding of fraud happening in the media and awareness of the meaning of Syria which we live, but probably do not we see the importance of what we live in safety, security and harmony .. I do not say these words are not coexistence minutes. So I can say that after two years of the steadfastness of the Syrian people in this way in the face of those media attack with satellite channels seeking to deploy Takfir and sectarian discrimination and .. I would say that the Syrian people is a great people do not concern it. Question .. In this sense, Mr. President, do not seem worried never so conversations are promoted and perhaps entrenched … Mr. President: Absolutely .. I say just the opposite .. On the principle of the vaccine .. Vaccine is a bacterium weak .. If kills immune Vsaattiyk. Martyrdom Bouti saddened everyone, without exception, of various denominations We have many examples we experienced and showed national unity .. But another example is the death of Dr. Bouti .. Martyrdom Bouti saddened everyone, without exception, of various denominations and seen it on the boards of solace spontaneous .. The state has no role in this issue .. and Dr Buti did not communicate with a lot of these .. However saw consolation councils and we have seen the grief of the Christian Brothers .. Not only Muslims .. It means that there is a genuine national unity .. These outposts in people with limited sectarian thought does not scare us .. I’m not worried about them at all. Question .. Mr. President .. Frankly .. We hear a lot recently in the media and through the speakers, Arabs and foreigners that there are liberated areas .. Any beyond the control of the state .. We see the situation in Aleppo and tenderness in Homs sometimes .. Is there already areas beyond the control of the state today in Syria … Mr. President: We sometimes deal with this situation in military terms is similar to deal with a traditional enemy .. When the enemy comes in the traditional way to occupy part of the ground, whereupon the national forces to attack the enemy and defend the country and expel the enemy out .. It does not matter if they ruled on the enemy or not rob them of it .. Maybe just come out without eliminating it .. But what is important in this case is the liberation of the land .. In this case we are dealing with a completely different situation .. A new war .. New style .. We are dealing with the intervention groups in cities .. Some of which are non-Syrian .. Arab foreign .. And some of them Syrian intervention in cities and neighborhoods and conducts sabotage. We are now in the process eliminate terrorists At the beginning of military actions carried out by the armed forces to expel terrorists from cities .. Sometimes it takes a few hours work .. We think that these terrorists came out of the place and went to another place to escape or maneuver .. It means to spend the whole time the liberalization process of the land without end. To be precise on this point .. Now we do not do the editing process to talk about the land liberated areas .. We are now in the process eliminate the terrorists .. The big difference between the first and second .. If not overturn the terrorists does not make sense for the Liberation of any region in Syria. If we understand this point we understand what happens on the ground .. There is another side when the armed forces or state military plans they develop or adopt plans on a number of grounds, including for example, the importance of the site in terms of political and media .. Including the human side of any suffering of the citizens and the military side .. Details of military logistics. Always a priority for us is a humanitarian point of view .. Protect the lives of citizens and alleviate the suffering of the areas to which enters the terrorists .. The political and media do not give priority .. Sometimes the benefit of the other party .. It does not matter .. Important fact .. Sometimes neglect the media side they start the process of “tattoo and honk” to show the victories .. This does not concern us, but often imposing nature of the battle that there is no consensus between the priority of military and humanitarian priority .. Of course temporarily and partially in some areas .. There are things that imposed the battle but for us it is a priority of the human hand. Question .. The problem is that there are many conversations promoted .. There are people who are talking about the division of geographic and sectarian division and even doctrinal .. Mr. President .. Is this really true .. Or is it included in the framework of intimidation and psychological warfare which is still a cornerstone of the ongoing war on Syria. I do not think there are real grounds for the division .. He must partition the limits of religious, sectarian or ethnic .. In practice these lines do not exist Mr. President: As long as we are not afraid of sectarianism .. I do not think there are real grounds for division. He must partition the limits of religious, sectarian or ethnic .. In practice these lines do not exist because the Syrian society is integrated in almost every region of Syria .. And sometimes in every village of the small villages .. Sometimes at the level of what we call “farms” It is the smallest of villages and non-existent on the map administrative .. We see this integration at the level of mating and families, it is hard to be there without division lines of this type .. But I think that what is published maps or marketed in different ways and leaking to the Syrians at various levels is part of the psychological war and part of the defeat that always talking about what I call virtual defeat or defeat free .. Any to send a message to the Syrians and Iguenauhm, .. B, “you will not be able anymore to live as you were in the past .. unified country .., you are not able to live with each other .. you people divided by its very nature,” the suggestion process intended to devote this conviction, the Syrians .. Also this argument does not worry me as long as the first IPO a sectarian offering .. It is the most serious has failed .. There is virtually no longer one of the foundations to build upon these maps .. Or any leaks and ideas can be transferred to us similarly. Question .. But, Mr. President, is talk that there may be separation between some major cities and rural areas .. For example, in Aleppo Aleppo season from its countryside .. In areas north and north-east are also talking about the subject of tenderness as well as Qamishli .. Also rumored that there are actually divided lines may be beyond the control of the state and perhaps Bracken is separate and isolated from Syria .. So this applies characterization submitted shortly before .. Mr. President: I do not .. This is not in the framework of the division .. Is not built on the basis of ethnic or sectarian lines .. Built on the places where the terrorists .. In practice if we are even talking about state control of the sense of presence, there is no place I tried to enter the armed forces only managed to enter .. If there is no fixed lines. So I say .. It is for us the humanitarian and military priorities are imposing presence places and military tactics. We must look to Syria as a bloc on the pots المستطرقة way .. If we put fluids in a number of vessels and arrived including Climate pipes, the water level in place affects all other receptacles .. Same thing for terrorists .. When beating in place a positive impact on other places .. Valtktic military sometimes imposes on the State to intervene in another place before that exist in place before that exist elsewhere .. Is a time delay for purely military targets .. But absolutely not linked to the subject of the division .. The issue of buffer zones. Question .. Turkey apparently will be up to the crisis with the Kurdish problem and there is talk that Erdogan might give the State of the Kurds .. As well as possibly waive some of the demands and perhaps access to divide Turkey. If there is a state will be set up for access to the presidency .. What about the situation in Syria and the particular situation of the Kurds … Mr. President: For Erdogan .. Of course he is willing to give all his own for the same .. This is true .. This is for the first part of the question and you are given the answer. But for the Kurds in Syria .. I want to repeat what I always say when I put this subject. Kurds in Syria are a natural and essential part of the Syrian fabric and they are present in this region centuries ago Kurds in Syria are a natural and essential part of the Syrian fabric and they are present in this region many centuries ago, like the Arabs, Turks, Persians, and others were present in this region. Are not guests or Tarin .. Most of the Kurds in Syria are Syrian nationalists .. But always in any society .. There are people who are opportunists trying to use specific addresses for their personal interests .. So we have seen a number of gatherings calling itself the Kurdish parties in Syria and has always been growing on the so-called Kurdish issue or the persecution of Kurds in Syria .. This is not true at all .. They were talking about the subject of naturalization Kurds .. About 110 thousand, which was about two years ago .. They considered the issue .. Naturalization .. Moved to the words of another language for Multi .. Now approved State months ago the subject of the Kurdish language and Kurdish literature as taught in the colleges of Arts in Syria .. And other procedures .. But always discuss from time to time about something that is used in order to find them on the national scene .. This case we see from time to time .. This is something that does not worry because the majority are with the Syrian homeland .. In order not to say words structurally .. I will not return to the role of the Kurds in the Syrian revolution and at different stages of the struggle against colonialism .. But I will talk about current events .. Many of the families of the martyrs who met her are Kurds .. I do not know that they are Kurds or Arabs because I do not care about this subject .. But through their talk they tell us we are the people of the martyr .. We Kurds .. Is it possible for someone who does not believe in the country and seeks to secede .. It also raises from time to time .. To submit his or her life or the lives of his sons for this country .. This is not logical. Question .. But, Mr. President, when we talk about this very sensitive point .. We followed through the policy of the Turkish government recently it has been used a lot of paperwork .. But the paper said that this is probably the last Kurdish securities Erdogan, however, specifically will not be simply indispensable .. It will be more aggressive in order to achieve a result at least in Syria .. At this particular time are seeking to bring about a settlement .. The extent to which monitors the Syrian leadership precisely this point .. And what is in the case has been anything in the face of this country .. Mr. President: This is an important topic .. Can not be simplified .. But Erdogan has a purpose internal and external target. Conditions for the Kurdish issue in Syria is quite different from Turkey in terms of the history of the relationship External goal is to Syria .. Any to embarrass Syria in the subject, taking into account that the conditions for the Kurdish issue in Syria is quite different from Turkey in terms of the history of the relationship .. We did not massacres against the Kurds did Ndthdhm as happened with them since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire stage .. Situation is completely different .. there is homogeneity in Syria and there is a real delay .. And put in the subject Kurdish put in Syria just a few decades ago by some opportunistic forces .. And our relationship Kurds are always a good relationship .. Even with the Kurdish parties, which were struggling for their rights in Turkey .. The other goal for Erdogan is an internal goal .. After the losses suffered by the politically inside Turkey against the backdrop of the failure of the so-called policy of zero problems and which turned out to be zero and zero policy vision and zero friends and zero credibility and zero ethics .. Other zeros in all directions except zero problems .. Losing so much of his loyalists .. Was to be the use of the subject of Kurdish in order to take advantage of the large Kurdish bloc in Turkey in order to get votes probably next in the Constitution through which thought to be the president of the Republic of wide powers .. So we care about this issue because what is happening in any neighboring country will affect us positively or negatively, but without being worried .. Except that there is no credibility to Erdogan in such a subject towards the Kurds and this is what our response to the recent friendly Kurdish forces that work on the Turkish and Syrian arena .. They do not trust Erdogan. Question .. There are also two contradictory points are accused by the Syrian state recently .. Opinion says that the Syrian state is a secular religion fights .. Others say that Syria backed away from secular cope with the recent events on the contrary, become more religious .. What is the truth Thread Mr. President .. Supports secular religions do not stand in the face Mr. President: We always drown terminology and discuss the content .. Drown in the linguistic sense .. But what is important is to practice .. For example was there Achtrakiat .. But all were called socialist .. There are those who practiced as a secular atheism and turn as they were in Turkey at various stages against religion fights religion .. There are secular which we understand .. Some say a secular open an eye for us freedom of religion .. We are a diverse community .. Every followers law or sect them the freedom to follow rituals and يمارسوها of the way that they deem appropriate .. This also means we should not treat as a state based on religion .. When it comes to a number of people to apply to a job, for example .. Do not ask of any religion or race this person belongs .. May not make a distinction on the basis of religion and not on the basis of race .. This is the concept .. I think that this concept is the concept of positive and good citizens .. As long as it is not a secular atheism, it means that it can not be against religion .. As long as we talk about freedom of religion, it means that this supports the secular religions do not stand in the face .. Completely contrary to religion is about morality, we need to morality and therefore we need religion .. The development process, for example .. Had a lot of people ask why stumble upon this process in different places .. I tell them .. Because you do you see the development process in Syria as a set of laws .. While it is built on ethics laws .. When they do not exist in the field of ethics can not develop community .. I secular means not differentiate between persons .. But this does not mean that I am not a Muslim and a Christian believer or a believer .. Quite the contrary, this picture is wrong .. The pictures that have been developed in the past about the conflict between Arabism and Islam .. Either you are a national or Islamic .. No .. I am an Arab and Muslim .. Arabic and Christian .. If the discrepancy between the two is the word incorrectly .. But that being said we moved from a secular direction of religious .. In Syria built since 1970 until today eighteen thousand Mosque .. Had against religion or secular We practice against religion .. How to allow construction of 18 thousand a mosque .. Built 220 schools and secondary legitimacy legitimacy, etc. .. Built dozens of institutes to train preachers .. If the religious side in Syria has always been an important aspect .. More importantly, if we want to say that secularism is atheism, as happens in a number of countries or as interpreted by other countries, it is impossible .. Because the state is the mirror of society .. If the community is committed to his religion must be a state based on religious grounds even though the secular .. Can not be the state does not devout religious and community .. And vice versa .. Can not be a form of state religion and society is not committed to his religion .. If we are a mirror of society .. Thus offering the first and the second offering both incorrect and inaccurate and reflects a lack of understanding of the fact and the meaning of the Syrian state and the meaning of secular Syrian state. Question .. But, Mr. President, we are talking here about the actions and decisions taken during the crisis .. Them to approve the establishment of a religious channel .. To allow advocates to work public advocacy … Committed to their religion in Syria, whether they are Muslims or Christians are the most during this national crisis .. It spoke of sectarianism is not these slides Mr. President: raise this issue both personally and directly with me in conversations with people or through some writings .. This shows the ignorance of the writing on this subject .. Because these things have nothing to do with the crisis at all .. In fact, the first signs or warning signs of danger after the invasion of Iraq began .. And specifically in 2004, when it began to show signs of extremism on the Syrian arena but it was at that time in most of the movement of people and thought extreme transient Syria .. Iraq beginning and later Lebanon .. And began trying to spread in Syria .. At that time basically has control of the security way .. The first disturbing incident was the incident of the attack on the radio and television building in 2006 by some of their seducer who told them the extreme Wahhabi Sheikh that this place is a hotbed of corruption and Kafr .. And they attacked him .. But the biggest warning when he got the first suicide bombing in Syria in 2008 and in the month of Ramadan by the Syrian people .. This was a major warning sign .. Against the backdrop of this explosion you meet with a number of senior clerics in Syria and we discussed the matter and we say that treatment is no longer sufficient security .. This is intellectual terrorism is terrorism primarily and intellectual Mnchoeh not need to fight it .. Can not fight terrorism or religious extremism only true religion .. This is the first treatment .. Come other means as complementary tools .. And put forward several ideas and one of them was Noor Sham TV .. At that time were not called Noor Sham TV .. But we need a way to face takfirist channels that began to sweep the space in the Arab and Muslim worlds .. Why are late in 2008 for the year 2011, a period of three years .. Because the idea was initially to launch this channel by the private sector .. For various reasons delayed .. We took the decision to نطلقها we, as a channel to be Islamic University do not express the thought of a particular religion or a particular religious stream .. For advocates also in 2008 and was one of the same procedures .. Especially that the advocacy work for women at that time was an act of secret gets in homes .. Or not to tell a secret, at least not under the eyes of the state because it is not official .. Was the idea that this is not a political act .. We are with the call .. Call to religion is something positive .. But when this call under the eyes of the state and state is Almsuulh of all sectors of society, including the religious sector, it holds the state responsible and at the same time if there is an attempt to exploit the invitation to targets outside the framework of the religious essence of the call can be for the state to correct this deviation .. And this experience has proven to be a good experience and useful .. These actions and others did not have a crisis, absolutely nothing .. On the contrary .. Crisis came to prove since the first day that religious institutions were the most disciplined .. To prove that committed to their religion in Syria, whether they are Muslims or Christians are the most during this national crisis .. It spoke of sectarianism is not these slides .. But from platoons .. Either of the species deviant religion towards religious extremism .. Or of secularism bidders family .. The moderate and committed nationally fact was .. So these actions are not linked to the crisis. Question .. Mr. President .. If we want to remain in the internal affairs .. If you will allow you to be talking about a political solution .. Since the government commissioned the implementation of the three stages of this solution began implementing the first phase of the boot and an end to violence for dialogue .. Currently consultations are is .. But, Mr. President, so far the street probably does not realize what are prohibitions dialogue and determinants of this dialogue in relation to the subjects as well as persons .. This dialogue with the ultimate … نحاور envious of Syria .. It did not deal with Israel overtly or covertly Mr. President: There is considerable confusion about what is happening now for dialogue for citizens .. First, there is the National Dialogue Conference, which is part of a political solution which I talked about in the “oratorical latter” in January .. This dialogue is not a dialogue between the state and the other party .. Is a dialogue between all the components of the Syrian society .. Private and political components .. About the future of Syria .. What is the political system required .. Parliamentary system .. Or a presidential .. Semi-presidential .. Anything else .. What about the Constitution .. What about the political and media laws, etc. .. Or any other topic .. The State here implemented as agreed upon by the conferees .. There is what is happening now than during a meeting of the Ministerial Committee chaired by the Prime Minister with the various parties in Syria .. Some believe that this is the dialogue .. This is not a dialogue .. These sessions consultations in order to determine how to begin dialogue .. If we want to go to the national dialogue conference .. Invited to the conference and on what basis is called … How is … Do we stand for a person or ten people .. Are you associated with the number of members in the representation of a particular party .. How do we call .. Clans or events .. We call .. There is no perception we do not want to build this conference only on perceptions of the state .. We want everyone to participate, we do these consultations maturation process of dialogue .. How poses Thread .. How to vote for him … And many details of things .. If we went to the national dialogue conference was not mature these grounds it failed before the conference starts .. Another aspect has to do with the state dialogue .. Now we are regardless of this initiative can talk with anyone .. نحاور envious of Syria .. It did not deal with Israel secretly or openly .. Both not flirts Israel .. All of the money not received in order to sell the home .. Each emphasizes the independence of Syria .. These are the basics .. This I consider a national foundation. Question .. Means national opposition .. Mr. President: the national opposition in the sense used become something different .. With every Unfortunately since the beginning of the crisis .. Some have an inferiority complex .. Some feel defeatism from the inside became national distributed free of charge to everyone .. All calls national opposition .. Take the examples .. There are those who appear on television and talking in each screen in a different language .. Speaking at every stage in a different language .. Is this a national opposition … Or oscillatory opposition … Can not be a national unless they are stable .. We have been in the country for the first day of the crisis we spoke one language .. We fight terrorism .. Struggle of trying to interfere in the internal affairs from the outside .. We reject domination .. At the same time the doors open for dialogue .. There are forces refused to dialogue in the beginning .. And later agreed to it .. If they are missed فليتفضلوا and say we were wrong .. Our assessment was wrong .. When we got out of Lebanon delivered a speech in 2005, I said we were wrong .. We had mistakes in Lebanon .. At the beginning of the crisis delivered a speech and said that there were errors .. Those they start just by changing their words .. Do you change speechless .. I do not I set .. For that he was arrested money which specifies the direction of speech … I speak frankly and clearly .. Is it because this person or that side was betting on specific bets that the state will fall within weeks or months, and thus is not interviewing of fall .. Will find a place for himself with the next, as some was thinking .. Some of these were silent when terrorist operations began .. Not denouncing terrorism, which began .. Find even justifications for terrorists .. Some of those did not support the military .. And all countries of all peoples in the world boasts of its armed forces as they express their unity and nation with all its components .. Some of them were attacking the army, rather than to stand with him in the army targeted the crisis before anything else because the address unity and steadfastness address .. All of these oscillations and variegated chameleon can not put it under the national title .. We have to ask questions intuitive .. Someone who was not or barely gets on the profiteers day .. We see today the aircraft moves from one place to another and sits in luxury hotels .. Personal finances this and that side .. Talking away from diplomacy .. No place for diplomacy now .. Funded .. If there is funding this uncertain .. It means that the decision depends on the decision of who pays .. How can a national if his decision in abroad .. Add to it .. All sit in the opposition abroad voluntarily forcibly they will tell you .. But in fact they are sitting abroad voluntarily .. Can not be this human nationally .. Especially in crisis .. If you expatriate in normal circumstances it must come to stand with your country .. Especially when they give lessons on national television .. How can you claim to national and fugitive abroad .. Where is the national … Asking people to move and give them lessons in patriotism They suffer every day in Syria and you are relieved abroad .. Where this convenience God knows .. There are many questions you should ask her so I expand on this topic .. Many questions must be asking before we oppose national .. So in this issue is not a place to compliment no place for hypocrisy .. Will Nnavq any one .. You must tell the traitor a traitor and an agent and client defeatist defeatist .. To Aotunai tell him no national .. Is it true that all opposition is a national opposition .. As for the opposition, it is by definition opposition .. If we had a million people are opposed to Syrian state policies .. Does this mean that these so-called opposition .. Can not نحاور a million people .. Can not share a million people in the government .. For example, practically opposition political sense in all countries of the world are elected opposition has a popular base .. If .. Of themselves that they know where the opposition is the election that determined the size of the opposition .. There are many questions you should ask her to define before these .. So if the question with talk … We have parties in Syria now .. Are still emerging but parties and national parties does not recite .. Not mortgage itself to the outside .. There are forces in the national home .. There are many Syrians national .. Do not stop the case on the issue of who fired on the same or himself enjoys a national opposition, which represents the people .. We know they do not represent only themselves. Question .. If proved determinants as well as the basics of the dialogue will remain a parliamentary regime in Syria, or there will be a presidential Parliament … There is no problem in question will be how Syria .. Presidential parliamentary system … This is determined by the people Mr. President: determinants course open .. Anything can be discussed .. There are no red lines only two things .. Syria’s independence .. This means there is no external interference in any internal affair .. This unresolved issue for us .. And stand with the terrorists .. If you do not tolerated stand with the terrorists, apart from that there is no problem in question will be how Syria .. Presidential parliamentary system … This is determined by the people .. For us, as determined by the people agree with it. Question .. Including the post of President of the Republic … I mean I mean even you, Mr. President … Mr. President: Position thing I do something else .. I mean, the job linked to the political system .. And the political system determines the powers of each position .. When changing the political system must be to change the powers of office in any direction .. This is something self-evident and, of course, this includes everything, even the powers of the president .. The President and ask him this subject is linked to the person and this is different from the powers .. Each person seeking to despise position .. So I see things .. If the job is just a tool and not a goal .. The project goal is provided by the person to the community and the people’s support for this project .. And access to the best condition for Syria .. What was done by hostile media in general .. Arab and other .. Is that they tried to show that the problem is not in the project and external forces come from abroad, not in extremism .. The problem is that the President is rejected by the people and this president adheres to the chair he kills his people for the Holy .. This raises continuously .. Therefore raised the issue of stepping down .. The fact that the job has no value .. If there is no support Popular Vamouncb No offers something for everyone .. What is the administrator must fight for is public support and satisfaction popular .. So I say to be decided by the people in this topic is the basis for the survival of the President or gone. Question .. Some fired term to negotiate with the system .. And no dialogue with the regime .. And our understanding of some Syrian officials that they have rejected this term .. What Vhmtamoh from term to negotiate with the regime and negotiations … Assumes himself as follows to external forces, as is the case for some, it could put the word negotiation Mr. President: I always like a country, state or society or nation family .. When sitting head of the family or family housewife with boys or boys sitting with each other or sit with each family .. They do not negotiate, but to engage in dialogue .. When you sit down with each other Syrians talk .. We say dialogue between the Syrians do not say negotiations between the Syrians .. If suppose the same person that strange “فيستطيع the negotiation call” .. If suppose himself as follows to external forces, as is the case for some, it could put the word negotiate .. But to accept them also therefore the foundations and the determinants of .. You negotiate your peers .. If you state you negotiate state .. The state does not negotiate persons .. If you are a party negotiation parties .. But not negotiate persons .. If you are a party you do not negotiate base people who call themselves the name of the party or stream or anything, but they have no base .. There is a kind of symmetry when put to negotiate .. For poses negotiation to determine the same .. Is it a Syrian dialogue with the Syrians .. Or an alien .. It represents. Question .. A quick tour of the area .. Find a visit to Kerry .. Israel as well as an apology from Turkey .. The resignation of the government of Lebanon and to assign Tammam Salam new government .. Striking is the situation in Daraa and what was said about the role of Jordan these events .. Is what is going on from the events accompanied by diplomatic and political events on the ground are pure coincidence in Syria today .. Mr. President: I think that there is a consensus that what happened recently is not a coincidence .. I think that if you ask anyone in this region and in Syria in particular .. Early and non-followers of the policy .. Will tell you that this things interconnected timetable .. In practice, Mr. who is the master and run one .. Clear this topic in the media .. It is not a secret pursuant .. Obama came and Kerry come to the same countries concerned by this escalation .. Especially what is happening in Daraa .. If things ربطنا with some of this indicates two things .. First indication that the external factor is a key factor as is happening in Syria since the first day .. This was difficult to persuade people to do .. Secondly, that whenever we have achieved successes will see a further escalation .. Because those external forces will not give up .. I am with you that the process is not a coincidence but it is wrong not to expect in advance or not we see clear. Question .. Mr. President .. Increasing talk a lot lately that Jordan has become a fixture in the ongoing war on Syria .. Means training camps .. The headquarters of the meetings .. The military leadership s even for terrorist groups on the ground .. Perhaps entry of large numbers of militants and weapons across the border this might also explain things in Daraa return to square one after a period of calm .. What’s the role played by Jordan .. It is not possible to believe that thousands walk in with their equipment to Syria at a time when Jordan was able to stop or arrest a person and a simple one carrying a weapon for the resistance in Palestine Mr. President: We got a lot of this information formally .. Some of them, of course, via media, قرأناها and heard all .. Some of them through diplomatic channels .. Some security Alakhrabr channels .. And all are in the same direction .. We immediately send a political envoy from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in private to Jordan, less than two months ago in order to put these data with Jordan officials and warns of the risks of what is happening will not only affect Syria .. Of course, heard all that would deny these facts .. Then he got in Daraa escalation .. We saw that thousands of militants and terrorists with arms and ammunition come from Jordan .. So we send a security official about a month ago or a little less also met with his counterparts security in Jordan and explained to them our existing data and also heard the complete denial about the involvement of Jordan before them all what is happening .. This is illogical .. Assume first that there are no camps .. Because what to put on the training camps unaudited information for us .. But what is uncertain Checker and confessions of terrorists and those who see us is they come through the Jordanian border .. It is not possible to believe that thousands walk in with their equipment to Syria .. At a time when Jordan was able to stop or arrest a person carrying a weapon one simple resistance in Palestine over the past years .. This talk is not convincing .. We hope some Jordanian officials who are not aware of the seriousness of the situation in Syria and what it means for Jordan .. It also means for other countries .. To be more aware in the estimation of this thing because the fire does not stop at our borders, and everyone knows that Jordan Exhibition him as Syria is exposed to him .. We wish to learn from the lessons we have learned from the stage of the Muslim Brotherhood .. These dangerous phase .. We wish them to learn to teach Iraqi officials who fully understand the importance of stability in Syria .. Regardless of some of the differences that existed between us and them in previous years .. But as a result of this awareness and as a result of the lessons learned that the fire in Syria must be transmitted to the neighboring countries .. This is what we wish. Question .. Mr. President .. Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia .. Most of the Gulf countries .. Of course talking about here is a faction of Lebanon .. There is also the governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen .. Talking about governments are not talking here about people Is it reasonable that they are all wrong and you are right .. Is it possible to be 300 million Arabs are wrong and a few tens of officials on the right Mr. President: Let’s ask the question another way .. These countries were together and we were part of the Arab summits .. At least since the first Arab summit in 2000 against the backdrop of the second Palestinian uprising .. And after the war in Iraq and then with the project of the Middle East and the road map on the back of the victory of America’s invasion of Iraq as it was marketed at that time .. And peaks on the background of the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006 and then in 2008 in the war on Gaza .. In all these joints .. You are an Arab citizen and you are a citizen of Syria Do you have confidence in any of these summits summit .. Did not hear from all Arab citizens of all kinds of slander for these peaks and us as officials Arabs sit in that room .. This makes us ask the question from your question .. Is it possible to be 300 million Arabs are wrong and a few dozens of officials in the hall on the right .. This gives us the answer is clearly .. The second point .. these countries we are talking about should not Nlomha the much because it is independent .. The decision is not in her hand .. Some of which the U.S. is strongly Mr. .. Some of which recently came through NATO .. And the other on tipping He lives in a troubled country and its people are not satisfied with him .. They need to before you give us legitimacy legitimacy .. As I said a few days ago .. Arab League are all legitimate need to .. But let’s put aside all this talk and take it in the trash for the simple reason that all these not Aanonna .. Who determines if we are right or wrong is the Syrian people I personally and all the Syrian official responsible to the Syrian people .. The Syrian people is just that we say we were or wrong .. We are right or wrong .. And any other hand does not concern us. Question .. Also if we went from these countries to Iraq’s neighbors .. Al Qaeda in Iraq recently announced that the Front victory affiliates .. and victory contrast Front pledged allegiance to al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri .. Mr. President .. Fighting in Syria now .. Fight al-Qaeda or terrorist groups or armed fighters fight moderates .. Both carry weapons and assaults on citizens is a terrorist .. Term “moderates fighters” is an American style of justification in front of their own people Mr. President: All of carrying arms and assaults on citizens is a terrorist .. Whether it belongs to the base or any other .. If we want to divide terrorists or base is the base of this is possible and this fact .. Had the tyrant rule is now in Syria under the title victory Front .. The term “moderate fighters” is a method to justify the U.S. in front of their own people .. America fought the Taliban after the events of 2001 and after many years she discovered she did not accomplish nothing in Afghanistan .. فالخسائر many American and hatred for America is becoming increasingly spread over terrorism in the world .. So I wanted to justify the dialogue with these groups and used against each .. Or perhaps to other political objectives .. She said that there is a good Taliban and bad Taliban .. Now they talk about moderate terrorist .. There are no moderate terrorist .. Is a terrorist. They call armed .. They call armed opposition .. This term offers to their people in the media because they have gone away to portray the situation as a conflict between the governor and the governed oppressed .. Thus the picture .. The back of terrorism and later appeared the identity of this terrorism is terrorism extreme western media could not hide this fact .. what then justify support the opposition .. What do you justify sending money, weapons and logistical support under different headings .. Non-lethal support … Non-lethal aid .. Civilian aid .. In the end can only be justified under the title “moderate militants”. Question .. But you said a little while ago that al-Qaeda is the predominant element in Syria now in terms of preparing and gear .. If this sense, the West arming al-Qaeda and funded .. How to understand it .. Mr. President: The truth is that the West always uses any item that appears in the arena even if it is against this element .. Proof that they are fighting al-Qaeda in Mali and support them in Syria and support them in Libya .. The same extremist groups that fought in Syria was supported in Libya, the same support Mali and Qatloha in Mali .. This is called double standards and I’ll call three standards and four standards .. And if there are a thousand standard I do not mind to have .. They use any paper detrimental to any country do not accept him .. Thus in the case of Syria are happy to come Qaeda .. They first dispose of these elements in different regions whether they يحاربونهم in Libya or in Mali or in Afghanistan or anywhere .. These elements come to Syria and this relieves the pressure in other areas .. On the other hand this leads to sabotage in Syria, regardless of who wins .. State or triumphed triumphed al-Qaida or other .. بالمحصلة Syria will pay the price, and the price will be dearly. West does not know or maybe does not realize now that this terrorism will return to the Western press has begun talking about the return of these risks We now see the results of vandalism for infrastructure and for sabotage in Syria thought .. This means that even if you win the state will be a weak state .. This is the aim of the west of this support .. But at the same time that the West does not know or maybe does not realize now that this terrorism will return to the Western press has begun talking about the return of these risks. In fact .. It also financed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at the beginning and paid the price dearly later .. Now they support in Syria and Libya and elsewhere and pay the price later in the heart of Europe and in the heart of the United States. Question .. Another term heard from him for a period of humanitarian intervention. Mr. President: recently put the term humanitarian intervention, and we have seen examples of this process of humanitarian intervention .. We’ve seen in the west parking with the Palestinian people sixty years ago against the Israelis for the Palestinian people .. We saw humanitarian intervention in Vietnam .. We’ve seen in the Korean War .. In the Korean War, I read several numbers .. At a minimum three million were killed .. There are those who say that the number of fire deaths of nine million U.S. in North Korea alone .. And we have seen in Iraq, and you know better than anyone the results .. And we’ve seen recently in Libya .. And we’ve seen in Syria .. Put in parallel with another term humanitarian intervention now a moral responsibility .. I think that humanitarian intervention sole purpose of human destruction Syrian simply and moral responsibility they are talking about recently is the responsibility of the withdrawal of the moral foundations in the destruction of the moral foundations upon which the Syrian society, particularly the dignity and uphold the rights .. Means to be people خانعا and admit that he can not defeat the big powers .. Dedicate this idea and reinforcing the principle of subservience .. You should know that these terms are dedicated for us something opposite .. That we always say not for the meek ​​or dependency or to surrender or defeat. Question .. Mr. President .. Than two years ago, and the ongoing crisis .. In your opinion, what prolonged the Syrian crisis .. Mr. President: various factors .. There are external factors and internal factors .. External factors we talked about .. The internal factors When you work on the scene the problem you must be a national consensus .. There is no doubt that we had a problem in the beginning to convince many Syrians fact what is happening .. You remember the first oratory in Parliament and the criticism directed at him .. Uncle talking .. Any plot .. Whenever something happens you say it’s a conspiracy .. With that I talked about in a simple and I said at the end of the speech we are ready to face .. They said that the issue emotional issue .. Any that if I went to the shield to the problem solved .. And I said to many at the time that the case did not start to finish fervent affection .. This scheme .. It is true that there are problems and gaps and internal factors built it .. but the issue is essentially external schema .. We were in front of a problem in convincing them that what is happening in the external media and rigging that killed demonstrators is not the state .. And that there are other points of the shooting on both sides in order to inflame feelings .. It was difficult to later convince them that these militants are not free army .. It is linked to Army and not free .. Works with money and kills through the money .. It was difficult to convince them that the bulk of the paid-up demonstrations .. Look at the early stages .. When she appeared Qaeda .. It was hard to convince many people that entered the base on the line until they saw all these things with their own eyes .. Unfortunately with all of our segments see things when it is late too late .. National Valajamaa in many cases necessary .. It is an important point .. How much time we need to convince them that the state does not destroy the mosques .. The last incident at the Omari Mosque .. Seen on YouTube and on TV how they blew up the minaret .. For the massacres .. All were placed massacre draw the Syrian Arab Army .. Unfortunately with all our slice was going versa .. Create a base for chaos in Syria .. If not weapons Fbalvkr .. There are stop with the terrorists without feeling .. I Athmh bad faith, but out of ignorance and without feeling .. Pen-and-modern thought and faulty logic .. They blocked .. Some of them or less vast discovered they are wrong, but some have yet to discover the truth .. This is the biggest obstacle. Question .. These elements of the continuing crisis, Mr. President .. But what about the elements of the steadfastness of the state until now .. In spite of all this mobilization .. Not for this people for everything that is not collapsed weeks as سوقوا but a few days .. Location strength of people’s strength and weaknesses of poor people Mr. President: I did not say the state has withstood .. I tell people survived .. This great nation has stood in this war two years .. Even the people themselves do not know what is the size of the attack .. Many people do not know what is the size of the attack .. But is touching the repercussions .. However withstood .. This fact .. Great people .. This underlines the essence of Syria .. Were it not for this people for everything that is not collapsed weeks as سوقوا .. But a few days .. I do not say that withstood the state .. Location strength of people’s strength and weaknesses of poor people .. And the resistance in Lebanon in 2006, its people triumphed by fighters .. Were it not for the people supporting her and steadfast with them could not stand .. This is the situation in each country .. And Syria is no exception. Question .. Mr. President .. We talked about everything that is political and field .. But let me turn a little to the humanitarian notch .. You father .. Why تشرحون for your children happening in Syria .. What do you say to them … Mr. President: By the way .. I’ve got three sons and not five as some marketed .. To return to the question .. Topic of this year .. I أتشارك the cap with all the parents .. There is no doubt that the events experienced by Syria and its repercussions and its economic, psychological, social and what we’ve seen on our television screens and hear children in the schools of dialogues and discussions are different from what they used before the crisis will leave serious effects and negative on the future of Syria, because they will be the next generation .. This is one of the objectives of the attack .. It is, as I said just before the destruction of human .. The first thing that we need to focus on is that this child out of the Syrian crisis is more faith in God .. Because more than the words used in the sabotage is “Allahu Akbar” .. How can you explain to a child that there is no link between the words “Allahu Akbar” and between absolute evil which is killing an innocent human being .. This issue will not be easy .. We have to explain to them how this word means good and loving and national unity .. Each absolute good in. .. The child must understand this point .. Because it is the basis of this faith, then you can proceed to the other faith, a faith strongly homeland and nation and the unity of the homeland .. If you believe in Allah and the nation have a solid belief in himself and a master .. Then reassure Syria .. I think that the responsibility comes in this framework if we are to maintain our home and work on children is because we we are faced with a generation drink a lot of misconceptions and bad and evil. There is no choice before us only victory Question .. How optimistic you look at the end of the day, Mr. President .. Mr. President: if there is no optimism in Syria in general and especially those who put their lives .. As we say colloquially .. On their palms and fighting for that we should live together .. If there is not what we fought primarily optimism and what صمدنا Syrians .. But this optimism نستمده as officials and a state of the people .. And أستمده I personally meet with citizens .. But particularly from the families of the martyrs .. This powerful families .. Jabara each carry a sense of the word .. When you sit with a mother or father and brothers, sons and say we made ​​the first martyr ready to offer second, third and fourth .. This is a national and boundless .. This is what motivates us to be optimistic .. There is the option of choice but victory .. If we win Syria ends .. I do not think that this is an acceptable option for any citizen in Syria. Broadcaster .. Thank you very much. Mr. President: I also want to thank you again and I applaud all the actors in the Syrian news channel and convey through you salute each Syrian citizen in this precious occasion and the university .. The occasion of Eid Galaa .. Which I hope, God willing, to come in the next year and be Syria has exceeded its crisis and ضمدت wounds.

Sararogha Drone Attack Highlights Total Breakdown of Pakistani National Military Strategy

[If the ISI did this to Pakistan, by tricking the CIA into this strike upon Hakeemullah Mehsud, then Pakistan's military intelligence agency has sabotaged the will of Rawalpindi  We may have just witnessed the Pak government cutting its own throat.  (SEE:  Drone Attack Upon Pak Showpiece In Sararogha).]

US drones kill 5 ‘militants’ in South Waziristan strike

By Bill Roggio

The US killed five “militants” in a drone strike today in an area of Pakistan’s Taliban-controlled tribal agency of South Waziristan. The strike is the second reported by the US in Pakistan in the past four days.

The CIA-operated, remotely piloted Predators or the more deadly Reapers fired a pair of missiles at what was described by AFP as “a base of the TTP,” or the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan. Five “militants” were killed in the strike and two more were wounded, Pakistani intelligence officials said. The Taliban “base,” which was located in the village of Sararogha, was leveled in the airstrike.

No senior al Qaeda or Taliban commanders or operatives are reported to have been killed in the attack.

The village of Sararogha has been a stronghold of the al Qaeda-linked Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan. In the past, Waliur Rehman, the head of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, is said to have directed operations from the village. Although the Pakistani military claimed it liberated Sararogha during an offensive that began in the fall of 2009, the fact that the US launched a drone strike in the village today indicates it is far from being under the control of the security forces.

An infamous peace agreement between the Pakistani military and Baitullah Mehsud, the founder of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, is named after Sararogha, as the agreement was signed in the village. The Sararogha Accord, which was reached in 2005, called for the military and the Taliban to end attacks on each other. The Taliban were not required to reject al Qaeda or stop sheltering its leaders and operatives, nor did the pact require the Taliban to lay down their arms. The truce remained in place until the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan announced its formation in 2007 and declared war against the state.

The strike in South Waziristan is the first in the tribal agency since Feb. 8, when the drones killed two Arabs who were identified as Sheikh Abu Waqas, a Yemeni explosives expert, and Abu Majid al Iraqi; four Uzbeks, who were likely from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; and a Taliban member.

In early January, the US launched three strikes in South Waziristan and killed two top Taliban leaders. On Jan. 6, the US killed Wali Mohammed, a commander in the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan. Three days prior, the US killed Mullah Nazir, a self-professed al Qaeda commander who led another Taliban group in the western part of South Waziristan that is not affiliated with the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, and several of his staff. And on Jan. 2, US drones killed five “militants” in an area under Nazir’s control.

Today’s strike is the second in Pakistan this month. The last strike, which occurred in the neighboring tribal agency of North Waziristan, took place on April 14. In that airstrike, five “militants” were said to have been killed.

The US has launched 13 drone strikes in Pakistan so far this year, according to data compiled by The Long War Journal. The number of strikes in Pakistan has decreased since the peak in 2010, when 117 such attacks were recorded. In 2011, 64 strikes were launched in Pakistan, and in 2012 there were 46 strikes.

The US has targeted al Qaeda’s top leaders and its external operations network, as well as the assortment of Taliban and Pakistani jihadist groups operating in the region. The strikes have been confined mostly to North and South Waziristan. Of the 338 strikes recorded since 2004, 321, or 95%, have taken place in the two tribal agencies.

Only from A West Virginian

[You would think that the Senator/former governor would understand that Mr. Gadahn, a.k.a. "Adam Pearlmen," is a nice Jewish boy, who no doubt works for the Mossad.  Gadahn has obviously not tried America's gun laws since becoming the "al-CIA-da" mouthpiece.  Manchin could only have come from a place that produced the DUCT TAPE BANDIT.]

Sen. Manchin: Even terrorists are ready to take

advantage of U.S. gun laws

Sen. Joe Manchin says America’s gun laws are so lax that at least one known terrorist is ready and willing to take advantage of them.

Mr. Manchin, West Virginia Democrat who is trying to push a bipartisan gun-control measure in the Senate, pointed to a picture of Adam Gadahn — an American-turned-al Qaeda operative — on Wednesday from the chamber floor.

---

SPECIAL COVERAGE: Second Amendment and Gun Control

---

“Our gun laws are so outdated and so out of whack, that even this person, who wants to damage and harm to every American — even this person — has figured out how to exploit them to arm themselves and people like him in our country,” Mr. Manchin said.

Mr. Manchin is one of the co-sponsors of a measure to expand gun-purchase background checks to sales online and at gun shows, although he indicated that proponents do not have the votes to pass it Wednesday.

Quoting Mr. Gadahn, the senator said, “‘America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms … so what are you waiting for?’”

“Well, I’m not waiting,” Mr. Manchin said. “I’m not waiting for him to get his hands on the guns.”

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2013/apr/17/sen-manchin-even-terrorists-are-ready-take-advanta/#ixzz2QkqYb0eU
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

3 Men Deported from Saudi for Violating Radical Wahhabi Prohibitions Against Beautiful People

[For those who believe in, or understand the concept of "anti-examples" (negative stereotypes used in dialectical "reverse reasoning"), this rediculous bit of Saudi news is a perfect corollary to the fundamentalist Wahhabi garbage ("scholarly reasoing") that has been regurgitated by the self-appointed Saudi religious authorities (Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice) for the past three-hundred years.   Their "fatwas" have been forcing all Saudi women to fry in their black shrouds in the murderous oven of the Arabian sun, because of a fact of nature--Every woman is attractive to some man, or to men in general.  Now, after all this time, the religious quackery is targetting men who are just too "good looking," the Wahhabi wheel has ground a deep rut into the desert sand, finally coming full-circle.  When will the honest men of Saudi Arabia rise-up against this imposter religion and the self-appointed royalty, who have ruled them with a rod of iron, enforcing this psycho-babble--ALL in the name of their version of "Islam," which is nothing more than a reversed mirror image of "True Islam." 

These are the people to whom we have entrusted the making of American foreign policy to in the Greater Middle East project.  This is why "al-CIA-da" is suddenly, apparently revived, even though the Pentagon claims to have slain the beast in its Af/Pak terrorist incubator. 

THE SAUDI MONARCHY MUST FALL before the Beast is truly laid in the ground.  Maybe if Riyadh suffered an invasion of handsome men the regime would fall from its own dead weight and the contradictions built into the foundations of the harsh desert kingdom?]

REUTERS

Performers raise their swords in front of a portrait of Saudi King Abdullah during a traditional dance rehearsal for the opening of the 28th Janadriya Heritage and Culture Festival, in Janadriya, outskirts of Riyadh April 3, 2013. Three men from the United Arab Emirates were kicked out of the event on Sunday because they were deemed to be “too sexy” by religious police.

Saudi Arabia deports 3 men for being too sexy

• By MICHAEL BLAUSTEIN

Three men were booted out of Saudi Arabia because they were deemed “too handsome” by religious authorities who worried that women would become attracted to them.

Sitting in the stands as delegates from the United Arab Emirates at the Jenadrivah Heritage & Cultural Festival in Riyad on Sunday, nothing seemed to be wrong with the men in question but that didn’t stop the mutaween, Saudi Arabia’s religious police, from charging in and hauling the men away, according to Arabic language newspaper Elaph.

“A festival official said the three Emiratis were taken out on the grounds they are too handsome and that the Commission members feared female visitors could fall for them,” the newspaper reported.

Drone Attack Upon Pak Showpiece In Sararogha

[The following snapshot (copy-block placed on article) details the latest CIA drone aggression in Sararogha, South Waziristan, the centerpiece of Gen. Kayani's highly-touted "Peace Through Development" puzzle.  The attack upon an alleged camp of Hakeemullah Mehsud in Sararogha took place in an area that has allegedly been free of TTP terrorists since operation "Rahe-Nijat"  (SEE:  The Effort To Disarm and Develop South Waziristan ).  If it was actually a Mehsud terrorist camp in the Sararogha "Quick Development Project" locality then there should have been an immediate reaction from the Pak Army, denouncing the attack, or the American attempt to sabotage Pakistan's peace program in the former FATA.  Lacking any noticeable Army reaction to the CIA penetration of the pacified area (an area described as a series of "ghost towns," because the displaced Mehsud tribes refuse to return to a war zone), it will be reasonable to put the blame for this S. Waziristan attack squarely upon the shoulders of Kayani and the ISI.  If the target was truthfully a "TTP camp," then the CIA drone attack would have been either in response to a Pak Army request to target Hakeemullah's terrorist forces, or another ISI deception like the one which killed Baitullah Mehsud.  The killing of Nazir was the first step in turning the area around Wana into an American "free-fire" zone; this was the second step. 

The heighth of hypocrisy is upon us, just in time for the Pakistani elections.]

http://www.thenewstribe.com/2013/04/17/alleged-ttp-commander-among-five-killed-in-waziristan-drone-attack/

Huge attack on WordPress sites

Risk Assessment / Security & Hacktivism

Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

Ongoing attack from >90,000 computers is creating a strain on Web hosts, too.

CloudFlare

Security analysts have detected an ongoing attack that uses a huge number of computers from across the Internet to commandeer servers that run the WordPress blogging application.

The unknown people behind the highly distributed attack are using more than 90,000 IP addresses to brute-force crack administrative credentials of vulnerable WordPress systems, researchers from at least three Web hosting services reported. At least one company warned that the attackers may be in the process of building a “botnet” of infected computers that’s vastly stronger and more destructive than those available today. That’s because the servers have bandwidth connections that are typically tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times faster than botnets made of infected machines in homes and small businesses.

“These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic,” Matthew Prince, CEO of content delivery network CloudFlare, wrote in a blog post describing the attacks.

It’s not the first time researchers have raised the specter of a super botnet with potentially dire consequences for the Internet. In October, they revealed that highly debilitating DDoS attacks on six of the biggest US banks used compromised Web servers to flood their targets with above-average amounts of Internet traffic. The botnet came to be known as the itsoknoproblembro or Brobot, names that came from a relatively new attack tool kit some of the infected machines ran. If typical botnets used in DDoS attacks were the network equivalent of tens of thousands of garden hoses trained on a target, the Brobot machines were akin to hundreds of fire hoses. Despite their smaller number, they were nonetheless able to inflict more damage because of their bigger capacity.

There’s already evidence that some of the commandeered WordPress websites are being abused in a similar fashion. A blog post published Friday by someone from Web host ResellerClub said the company’s systems running that platform are also under an “ongoing and highly distributed global attack.”

“To give you a little history, we recently heard from a major law enforcement agency about a massive attack on US financial institutions originating from our servers,” the blog post reported. “We did a detailed analysis of the attack pattern and found out that most of the attack was originating from [content management systems] (mostly WordPress). Further analysis revealed that the admin accounts had been compromised (in one form or the other) and malicious scripts were uploaded into the directories.”

The blog post continued:

“Today, this attack is happening at a global level and WordPress instances across hosting providers are being targeted. Since the attack is highly distributed in nature (most of the IPs used are spoofed), it is making it difficult for us to block all malicious data.”

According to CloudFlare’s Prince, the distributed attacks are attempting to brute force the administrative portals of WordPress servers, employing the username “admin” and 1,000 or so common passwords. He said the attacks are coming from tens of thousands of unique IP addresses, an assessment that squares with the finding of more than 90,000 IP addresses hitting WordPress machines hosted by HostGator.

“At this moment, we highly recommend you log into any WordPress installation you have and change the password to something that meets the security requirements specified on the WordPress website the company’s Sean Valant wrote. “These requirements are fairly typical of a secure password: upper and lowercase letters, at least eight characters long, and including ‘special’ characters (^%$#@*).”

Operators of WordPress sites can take other measures too, including installing plugins such as this one and this one, which close some of the holes most frequently exploited in these types of attacks. Beyond that, operators can sign up for a free plan from CloudFlare that automatically blocks login attempts that bear the signature of the brute-force attack.

Already, HostGator has indicated that the strain of this mass attack is causing huge strains on websites, which come to a crawl or go down altogether. There are also indications that once a WordPress installation is infected it’s equipped with a backdoor so that attackers can maintain control even after the compromised administrative credentials have been changed. In some respects, the WordPress attacks resemble the mass compromise of machines running the Apache Web server, which Ars chronicled 10 days ago.

With so much at stake, readers who run WordPress sites are strongly advised to lock down their servers immediately. The effort may not only protect the security of the individual site. It could help safeguard the Internet as a whole.

R2P=I2I (“Instigate to Intervene” Disguised As “Responsibility to Protect”)

[SEE: The Obscenity of Humanitarian Warfare ]

“Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) Or “Instigate to Intervene” (I2I)

Anti-Human Rights, Chaosistan, Phenomenon of Terrorism, Syria

By Atul BHARDWAJ (India)

American democracy appears to be in jeopardy. Irrespective of the political dispensation at the White House, the policy of promoting proxy wars and covert military operations across the globe continues to mutate.

Any nation that decides to exercise its sovereign right to protect its citizens from armed insurgents incurs Washington’s wrath. America wants to permanently amend the rules of the game by stating that a nation’s right to protect is subordinate to the international community’s responsibility to Protect (R2P). Syria is the latest in the long list of nations that is suffering to sustain American imperialism.

R2P is the new name for humanitarian intervention, a norm adopted by the UNO in 2005. According to Gareth Evans, R2P equips everyone in the international community to prevent the “catastrophic human rights violations taking place behind sovereign state walls,” with “coercive military action as a last resort, not a first.”

The problem with analysts like Gareth is that their vision permits them to peep through the walls of sovereignty but not through the iron curtain of the empire that adheres to the doctrine of Instigate to Intervene (I2I). It is through use of such dubious norms and instigations that America attacked Libya and is now in the process of destabilizing Syria. Russia, China and Iran are the three countries preventing the Western military juggernaut to roll over Syria completely.

In an open defiance of well established international practices, Washington is blatantly using Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE to lead an armed insurgency inside Syria. As a result the three-year-old dissent in Damascus is now an international problem. The Western media, with an agenda to flare up the situation in Syria began beaming in the misdemeanors of Bashar Al-Assad and his dynastic rule; projecting the opposition as victims of political atrocity.

Political struggle is a part and parcel of any state. The problem begins when political fissures are exploited by external actors. This is exactly what has happened in Syria where the government’s legitimate actions against the opposition-armed militancy are being dubbed as human rights violations.

The branding of Assad as a tyrant is a ruse to plunge the nation into a war of attrition. Since the beginning of January 2012, the C-130 transport aircraft loaded with weapons have been regularly taking off at the American military base in Qatar to land at Turkish airports. From the airports, the arms consignments travel by road to rebel-military camps on the Syria-Turkey border.

The NATO’s encouragement to Syrian rebels is not limited to moral and material support; the NATO countries are also in the forefront to mobilize manpower to augment the foot soldiers of the Free Syria Army (composed of Syrian military officers who have defected from their parent outfit, a bunch of mercenaries and Al-Qaeda terrorists). According to a study by King’s college London, “Hundreds of Europeans have travelled to Syria since the start of the civil war to fight against the country’s President, Bashar al-Assad…600 individuals from 14 countries including the UK, Austria, Spain, Sweden and Germany had taken part in the conflict since it began in 2011. European fighters made up to between 7% and 11% of the foreign contingent in Syria, which ranged between 2,000 and 5,500 people.”

America has anointed the main opposition party, Syrian National Coalition (SNC) to occupy the official Syrian seat at the Arab League. It is perhaps for this reason that Moaz al-Khatib the former leader of SNC, admitted, “We thank all the governments who supported us, but the role to be played by the United States is much bigger.” To democratize the instigation to intervene, and retain American control, the US has appointed Ghassan Hitto, an IT professional from Dallas, US, as the head of the planned interim government.

The imperial American obduracy flows from the ideological belief that the nation-states’ ‘monopoly over organized violence’ is not a right that can be exercised without the approval of the empire. Thereby meaning that the states are authorized to use violence within their own territory, only to protect those people certified as victims by the empire. Any violence against the American certified victims is branded as human rights violations and genocide.

The Western fetish for R2P and their so-called ‘good intentions’ have already caused mayhem in the lives of ordinary Iraqi or Libyan. The Russian President Putin says,

“The state is falling apart, Inter-ethnic, inter-clan and inter-tribal conflicts continue.”

However, the Americans will not abandon R2P because it is a tool to re-order the states in accordance with what Stephen Gill has identified as “new constitutionalism – imposition of new constitutional and quasi-constitutional political and legal frameworks – with respect to the state and the operation of strategic, macroeconomic, microeconomic and social policy.”

Atul Bhardwaj is a researcher at School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi. He can be contacted at atul.beret@gmail.com.

Libyan Wahhabis Continue To Slander True Islam, By Desecrating the Dead

[Victorious Muslim Brotherhood foot soldiers do what Wahhabis do best, embarass The Prophet (PBUH).  Bottom Line, every Wahhabi attack upon fellow Muslims is an attack upon Islam itself.]

Gravestones are seen damaged by an Islamist group in protest at the burning of the Koran by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, in Benghazi Military Cemetery February 24, 2012. The cemetery, which is home to soldiers who died during the second world war, was built by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
(© Esam Al-Fetori / Reuters/REUTERS)

Lone guard at Canadian’s Libyan gravesite no match for Islamist mobs

GEOFFREY YORK

BENGHAZI, LIBYA

 

With his 9-millimetre pistol tucked in his belt, bleary-eyed volunteer guard Naser al-Werfali is the last line of defence for the windswept graves of the “Desert Rats” who defeated the Nazis in North Africa.

More than 150 graves, including that of a Canadian war hero, were smashed or desecrated last year by a mob of Islamist extremists who invaded the Commonwealth war cemetery in Benghazi. Months later, the cemetery was attacked again, wreaking further destruction to the graves and memorial crosses.

Now the lone guard is asking for help. “As long as I’m alive, I’ll protect this place,” he told an early morning visitor in February, as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “I keep asking for more support and security, and nobody helps. I’m risking my life, and nobody cares.”

The assaults on the cemetery, where at least nine Canadians are among the 1,200 soldiers buried or commemorated, are a sign of the persistent power of the hard-line Islamist militias that control much of Libya since the demise of dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

Nobody has been brought to justice for the destruction of the war graves. The Islamists operate with impunity. They are a small minority in Libya, yet they are so heavily armed and aggressive that few people are willing to tangle with them, and the Libyan government is too weak to restrain them.

With their purist views on religion, radical Islamists have attacked Coptic and Orthodox churches, assaulted priests, fired grenades at Red Cross offices that were accused of proselytizing and destroyed dozens of shrines of the Sufi sect of Islam. Under the influence of the same ideology, Libyan military authorities arrested more than 50 Egyptian Copts and other foreign Christians in Benghazi on suspicion of proselytizing or distributing Christian pamphlets.

This year alone, a Coptic church in Misrata was bombed, killing two Egyptian Christians, and a Coptic church in Benghazi was torched, nearly killing its priest.

The Canadian government is among those who have protested against the attacks. “Canada is deeply concerned about the recent attacks on religious minorities in Libya and condemns the recent burning of a Coptic Christian church in Benghazi,” said a statement last month by Michael Grant, the Canadian ambassador to Libya.

When the mob attacked the Benghazi war cemetery in February last year, one of the headstones that they smashed was on the grave of Flying Officer Martin Northmore, a pilot from Toronto whose fighter plane crashed in 1943 as he was escorting a convoy in the Allied campaign against the Nazi forces in North Africa.

Before going overseas, Mr. Northmore was stationed on Prince Edward Island, where he had eloped while on leave. The RCAF officer, who died right before his 26th birthday, was buried inside Benghazi War Cemetery.

That month, the Toronto Star reported, his aunt, Leila Bishopp Martin, wrote a poem titled Broken Fight mourning his loss.

Your love so fond – your spirit true and gay,

Soared high to reach the stars beyond the night;

But groping still – along our dusty way –

We search the skies, above a broken flight.

A video posted on YouTube shows a mob of armed men deliberately toppling the yard’s gravestones, targeting Christian and Jewish graves, and destroying a large “Cross of Sacrifice” memorial. “Crazy people did it – extremists with beards,” Mr. al-Werfali said. “The extremists don’t like to see crosses.”

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, based in Britain, promised to replace the destroyed headstones and memorial cross, but Benghazi was considered too dangerous for foreign workers so the restoration was delayed for most of the past 14 months. A replacement cross and headstones were sent to the cemetery to be installed, but the cross was attacked again and smashed into rubble.

Leaders of Libya Shield, one of the biggest Islamist militias in Benghazi, deny any knowledge of the cemetery attacks. They said the attacks were “totally wrong” – the work of “illiterate” people. But they could not explain how the mob was able to assault the cemetery so openly, in broad daylight, with nobody stopping them and nobody punished for the attack, and then were able to repeat the assault a few months later.

Although the Islamist radicals are a minority of public opinion in Libya, their military muscle and ability to intimidate their rivals could be crucial over the next year as Libya tries to draft a post-Gadhafi constitution. A key question is whether the constitution will enshrine Islamic sharia law as the supreme law of the land.

The attacks on Christian and Sufi sites are part of a larger struggle for power by the Islamists across Libya, observers say. “Behind the scenes, they’re trying to take control of the government, the country,” said Abdullah Banun, a prominent Sufi lawyer and head of a Sufi teaching centre in the Libyan capital, Tripoli.

Mr. Banun, who has endured death threats and attacks on his family, says the anti-Sufi campaign is spearheaded by Salafist radicals who follow the agenda of extremists in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. “They’ve already succeeded in taking control of the mosques,” he said in an interview. “They’ve expelled many imams and replaced them with younger imams who agree with them. They’re all filled with Salafist ideas, and they’re strongly attacking the Sufis.”

Some towns in eastern Libya, such as the town of Derna near Benghazi, have turned into “Islamist emirates” under the control of the radicals, Mr. Banun said. “They don’t want the country to stabilize. Whether they seize power or not, they’re very organized and they have weapons, and the Libyan military can’t stop them. My biggest fear is that they’ll take over the country. Their understanding of sharia law is just chopping off hands.”