Last month, US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (who served two tours of duty in Iraq) went on CNN and laid bare Washington’s Syria strategy.

In a remarkably candid interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gabbard calls Washington’s effort to oust Assad “counterproductive” and “illegal” before taking it a step further and accusing the CIA of arming the very same terrorists who The White House insists are “sworn enemies.” 

In short, Gabbard all but tells the American public that the government is lying to them and may end up inadvertently starting “World War III.”

For those who missed it, here’s the clip:

That was before Paris.

Well, in the wake of the attacks, Gabbard has apparently had just about enough of Washington vacillating in the fight against terror just so the US can ensure that ISIS continues to destabilize Assad and now, with bi-partisan support, the brazen Hawaii Democrat has introduced legislation to end the “illegal war” to overthrow Assad. 

Gabbard, who fought in Iraq – twice – has partnered with Republican Adam Scott on the bill. Here’s AP:

In an unusual alliance, House Democrat and Republican have teamed up to urge the Obama administration to stop trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad and focus all its efforts on destroying Islamic State militants.

Reps. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, and Austin Scott, a Republican, introduced legislation on Friday to end what they called an “illegal war” to overthrow Assadthe leader of Syria accused of killing tens of thousands of Syrian citizens in a more than four-year-old civil war entangled in a battle against IS extremists, also known as ISIS.

“The U.S. is waging two wars in Syria,” Gabbard said. “The first is the war against ISIS and other Islamic extremists, which Congress authorized after the terrorist attack on 9/11. The second war is the illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad.”

Scott said, “Working to remove Assad at this stage is counter-productive to what I believe our primary mission should be.”

Since 2013, the CIA has trained an estimated 10,000 fighters, although the number still fighting with so-called moderate forces is unclear. CIA-backed rebels in Syria, who had begun to put serious pressure on Assad’s forces, are now under Russian bombardment with little prospect of rescue by their American patrons, U.S. officials say.

For years, the CIA effort had foundered — so much so that over the summer, some in Congress proposed cutting its budget. Some CIA-supported rebels had been captured; others had defected to extremist groups.

Gabbard complained that Congress has never authorized the CIA effort, though covert programs do not require congressional approval, and the program has been briefed to the intelligence committees as required by law, according to congressional aides who are not authorized to be quoted discussing the matter….

…..“People said the very same thing about Saddam (Hussein), the very same thing about (Moammar) Gadhafi, the results of those two failed efforts of regime change and the following nation-building have been absolute, not only have they been failures, but they’ve actually worked to strengthen our enemy.”

Oh, and if you needed another reason to like Tulsi, here’s a bonus 40 second clip for your amusement…

• source: zerohedge.com

Express-Notes:

So in a nutshell, The US has been looking to oust Assad from Syria since he stands in the way of a gas pipeline to be built from Turkey through Syria into Europe to supplant Russia as Europe’s main supplier. Queue the anti-Russian/anti-Putin propaganda. You may remember the US was poised to invade Syria in 2013 but their cause was exposed as a lie and a fabrication. You may also remember the entire invasion of Iraq was also based on lies and fabrications but they got away with that one. Iraq was decimated and destabilized. (see previous posts on this topic – links below)

Coincidentally, the US cause has benefited from the uprising of the Islamist extremists now dubbed ISIS who also seem to be marching toward Damascus to unseat Assad. hmmm? The US has been shadow-boxing with ISIS through their “war on terror” basically bombing out Syrian infrastructure as ISIS seems to be growing stronger and more well-funded.

Enter Putin with an invitation from Assad to help push back the ISIS extremists starts bombing and demolishing ISIS strongholds. He does more damage in a couple weeks than the US has done in well over a year.

He also points out that the way to weaken ISIS would be to cut off their support and funding.  Putin presents evidence  that ISIS is selling oil they produce in the fields of destabilized Iraq, through Nato’s Turkey, one of the main US allies in the region. That news is overshadowed in the American mainstream media.

Russia Explains To Clueless US Public Why Obama Can’t Defeat ISIS

CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta asked President Obama the following question at a press briefing:

“A lot of Americans have this frustration that they see the United States has the greatest military in the world, it has the backing of nearly every other country in the world when it comes to taking on ISIS. I guess the question is, and if you’ll forgive the language, but why can’t we take out these bastards?”

Well Jim, the answer is quite simple and indeed, if you – or any other member of the mainstream media for that matter – would bother to look at things like the declassified Pentagon report that Judicial Watch turned up earlier this year, you’d be less confused.

Allow us, once again, to provide you with the answers you seek, straight from the Pentagon ca. 2012:

…there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”

Translation: if Sunni extremists were to establish a proto-state in eastern Syria that would be great because it would destabilize Assad and cut off Iran from Hezbollah thus endangering the preservation of Tehran’s Shiite crescent. 

For those who need a still simpler formulation: ISIS started out no different than any of the other rebels the US supports in Syria. They likely received guns, money, and training if not directly from the US, then from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Washington seems to have had some idea that they would seek to capture and hold territory and as far as the Pentagon was concerned, that was just fine. Whether or not the CIA anticipated what would come next is up for debate, but make no mistake, US intelligence knew good and well this was a possibility and let it happen because ousting Assad was (and still is) the top priority.

…..In case any of the above isn’t clear enough, Sergei Lavrov has commentary which may help to drive the point home, presented below without further comment:

 “Despite announcing ambitious plans for its coalition against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), the analysis of those [US-led] airstrikes during over a year lead to conclusion that they were hitting selectively, I would say, sparingly and on most occasions didn’t touch those IS units, which were capable of seriously challenging the Syrian army.”

• source: zerohedge.com

General Wesley Clark: ISIS Serves Interests Of US Allies Turkey And Saudi Arabia

“Let’s be very clear: ISIS is not just a terrorist organization; it is a Sunni terrorist organization. That means it blocks and targets Shi’a. And that means it’s serving the interests of Turkey and Saudi Arabia – even as it poses a threat to them.” – Retired Gen. Wesley Clark

Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander General and retired U.S. General Wesley Clark revealed in an interview with CNN that the Islamic State (Daesh, ISIS) remains geostrategically imperative to Sunni nations, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, as they clamor for strategic power over Shi’a nations, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. He explained that “neither Turkey nor Saudi Arabia want an Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon ‘bridge’ that isolates Turkey, and cuts Saudi Arabia off.”

When asked by the CNN host if Russian President Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that Turkey was “aiding ISIS” had any validity, he responded:

 “All along there’s always been the idea that Turkey was supporting ISIS in some way. We know they’ve funneled people going through Turkey to ISIS. Someone’s buying that oil that ISIS is selling; it’s going through somewhere – it looks to me like it’s probably going through Turkey – but the Turks haven’t acknowledged that.”

• source: zerohedge.com

Russia Presents Detailed Evidence Of ISIS-Turkey Oil Trade

What’s critical is that the world gets the truth about who’s financing and facilitating “Raqqa’s Rockefellers.” If a NATO member is supporting this, and if the US has refrained from bombing ISIS oil trucks for 14 months as part of an understanding with Erdogan, well then we have a problem. For those who need a review, see the following four pieces:

Unfortunately for Ankara, The Kremlin is on a mission to blow this story wide open now that Turkey has apparently decided it’s ok to shoot down Russian fighter jets. On Wednesday, we get the latest from Russia, where the Defense Ministry has just finished a briefing on the Islamic State oil trade. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Turkey may be in trouble……

…..The main consumer of stolen from legitimate owners – Syria and Iraq – the oil is Turkey. According to the data entered in this criminal business involved the highest political leadership of the country – President Erdogan and his family. 

• source: zerohedge.com

ISIL Financed by 40 Countries, Including G20 Member States – Putin

– Putin said at the G20 summit that Russia has presented examples of terrorism financing by individual businessmen from 40 countries, including from member states of the G20.

“I provided examples related to our data on the financing of Islamic State units by natural persons in various countries. The financing comes from 40 countries, as we established, including some G20 members,” Putin told reporters following the summit……

Russia has also presented satellite images and aerial photos showing the true scale of the Islamic State oil trade…..

• source: sputniknews.com

Poll shows 81 percent of Syrians believe US created ISIS

A recent opinion poll commissioned by the BBC and performed by the market research firm ORB across all 14 governates of Syria found that 82 percent of those surveyed believe that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), with which the government of President Barack Obama is ostensibly at war, is itself a creation of Washington……

The poll has been largely ignored by the corporate media in the US and the West generally. Those few outlets that have reported it have led with its finding that one out of five Syrians surveyed said that ISIS exerted a positive influence, as opposed to the four out of five who believe that the Islamist militia is a proxy force for US imperialism.

This is hardly surprising, as the results run so diametrically counter to the official propaganda line in Washington, which casts the Syrian government as somehow operating in league with ISIS in a bid to discredit the virtually nonexistent “moderate opposition.”

In reality, while claiming to be engaged in a war to, in President Barack Obama’s words, “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS, over one full year of US military operations have not begun to do either. Moreover, Washington and its key regional allies have proven again and again to be the Islamist militias’ principal sources of strength and support.

That ISIS is the product of the criminal US wars of aggression in the region is indisputable. Neither it nor any similar movement existed in either Syria or Iraq until after the US carried out its unprovoked invasion of 2003, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and deliberately stoking sectarian tensions in a divide-and-conquer strategy to pit Shiites and Sunnis against each other.

In 2011, the US-NATO war for regime change in Libya utilized Al Qaeda-linked militias—now affiliated with ISIS—as proxy ground troops in overthrowing and murdering Muammar Gaddafi and plunging the country into a state of chaos that continues to this day.

Subsequently, both fighters and weapons were funneled from Libya to Syria under the guiding hand of the CIA in a bid to reprise the strategy of regime change in Libya by overthrowing Assad and toppling a third secular government in the region. Once in Syria, ISIS enjoyed ample support from Washington’s main regional allies: Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar.

The belief held by four out of five Syrians that ISIS is “made in the USA” is no doubt further strengthened by the massive infusion of US weaponry that took place following the collapse of the American-armed Iraqi security forces in the summer of last year. The Iraqi regime acknowledged that the Islamists captured some 2,300 US-made Humvees, not to mention scores of tanks, artillery and vast quantities of “small arms” and ammunition.

While the overrunning of Mosul and other cities proved a debacle for US policy in Iraq, where billions of dollars and years of effort had been spent training puppet security forces, the massive armament of ISIS, which is one of the principal armed opponents of the Assad regime, could not have been wholly unwelcome in Washington.

Meanwhile, the popular conviction in Syria that ISIS is a US Frankenstein’s monster is no doubt further fueled by the so-called war against the Islamist militia, which, after more than a year of bombing, has succeeded in reducing neither its number of fighters nor the amount of territory where it holds sway in both Iraq and Syria.

Meanwhile, as the chief of the US Central Command, Gen. Lloyd Austin, admitted Wednesday, with $40 million out of a $500 million US training program for Syrian anti-ISIS fighters spent, the number of such US-trained fighters on the ground in Syria totals “four or five,” with barely 100 others undergoing training.

Given such results, it is impossible for the overwhelming majority of Syrians to escape the conclusion that the so-called “war against ISIS” is merely window dressing for Washington’s pursuit of its main objectives in Syria. These consist of the overthrow of Assad—with ISIS, the al Nusrah Front and other Islamist militias serving as US proxy ground troops—the tightening of the US grip on the energy-rich Middle East and the weakening and isolation of the main allies of Damascus: Iran and Russia, which are among the next targets for the global eruption of American militarism.

 • source: wsws.org

American Journalist Murdered By Western Ally For Exposing ISIS Ties

ISIS Colonel was Trained By Blackwater and U.S. State Department for 11 Years

A former police commander from Tajikistan was featured in an ISIS video recently where he admitted he was trained by the U.S. State Department and former military contractor Blackwaterall the way up until last year. At a Blackwater facility in North Carolina, Col. Gulmurod Khalimov received “counter-terrorism training.”

“From 2003-2014 Colonel Khalimov participated in five counterterrorism training courses in the United States and in Tajikistan, through the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security/Anti-Terrorism Assistance program,” said US State Department spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala.

According to CNN’s fearmongering report, “The program is intended to train candidates from participating countries in the latest counterterrorism tactics, so they can fight the very kind of militants that Khalimov has now joined.”

In the video he spoke in Russian, giving a speech perfect for a mainstream media report: “Listen, you American pigs, I’ve been to America three times. I saw how you train soldiers to kill Muslims…we will come to your homes and we will kill you.”

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