Category Archives: Geopolitics/War

Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

CSIS ignored 9/11 warnings & allowed assassinations on Canadian soil, says ex-spy in court docs

CSIS allowed targeted assassination of 2 residents on Canadian soil, says ex-spy in court docs

Jorge Barrera
APTN National News: November 14, 2014

Canadian spies used death threats to secure sources and allowed the assassination of two people on Canadian soil by a foreign agency, a former intelligence officer alleges in documents filed with the Federal Court.

Danny Palmer, a former intelligence officer with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), also said he authored two threat assessments in April and August 2001 warning of an “aerial attack” against the U.S. that were never passed on to U.S. authorities, according to court documents.

Palmer, a 12 year-veteran of CSIS, claimed in court documents he was fired from the spy agency because he repeatedly raised concerns about some of CSIS’ practices. He said the practices undermined the agency’s operations along with “national and international security.”

(Read the full article at APTN)

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Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

7 Things Harper Doesn’t Want You To Know About The China Trade Treaty (And A Few He Does)

Daniel Tencer
Huffington Post: September 17, 2014

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Chinese investors will have the right to challenge our laws with no recourse to Canadian courts

Supreme Court of Canada (Getty)
The Canada-China FIPA isn’t a complete trade deal. It’s more like one chapter of a trade deal — the chapter that deals with protecting investors’ rights.

Under these agreements, foreign companies gain the right to sue the host country in an international tribunal that doesn’t answer to national courts. Critics say this essentially gives foreign companies the ability to trump Canadian laws.

True, but under the Canada-China FIPA, a Chinese investor or business will have to prove they were subjected to different rules than would apply to a local investor or business. That strongly limits the extent to which Canadian laws can be challenged at the tribunals, and Canada’s ability to pass environmental and other laws likely won’t be as constrained as critics say. Canada will still be able to reject major investments from Chinese companies.

Supporters of the Canada-China FIPA say Canada needs a deal like this with China because we are running a $30-billion-a year trade deficit with the country. To get our money back, we need Chinese investment, and the FIPA gives investors the confidence they need to put their money here.

  • The government can keep lawsuits secret

    Getty
    In the treaty, the government retained the right to hide documents filed in a lawsuit against Canada under the Canada-China FIPA. This is despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that these rulings can go against Canadian government policy.
  • There was no public consultation, no debate, no legislation

    Getty
    This trade treaty, meant to last a generation, got an hour of debate in front of the House of Commons’ trade committee, and that’s it.
  • Canada will be bound by the treaty for 31 years

    Getty
    NAFTA can be terminated in six months, but the Canada-China FIPA runs a minimum of 15 years, has a one-year notice of termination period, and extends rights to Chinese companies already operating in Canada by 15 years after the deal is cancelled.

    Supporters of the deal say the at minimum 31-year timeline makes sense for protecting long-term investments and projects.

  • Some say it’s a better deal for China than for Canada

    Shanghai (Getty)
    So far, FIPAs have been advantageous to Canadian business because they have largely protected Canadian investments in other countries. (“Canadian mining companies are using FIPAs with developing countries to claim damages from community opposition to unwanted mega-projects,” the Council of Canadians reports.)

    But with China, Canada is on the other side of that equation — it’s largely the destination country for investment. “Canada will be much more exposed to claims and corresponding constraints” than China under the deal, Osgoode law prof Gus Van Harten writes.

    Though the deal sets up the same protections for Canadians investing in China as for Chinese investors in Canada, it creates “de facto non-reciprocity,” Van Harten argues, because of the imbalance in the trade relationship.

  • Minority shareholders will be able to sue

    Investors look at stock prices at a securities exchange in Shanghai on August 22, 2014. (Getty)
    Even if a Chinese citizen owns a small portion of a Canadian company, they will be able to use the tribunals set up under the FIPA, Van Harten says.
  • There’s a legal challenge to the deal in the courts right now

    Hupacasath First Nations welcoming figures, Port Alberni, B.C. (Getty)
    British Columbia’s Hupacasath First Nation launched a court challenge on the constitutionality of the deal in January, 2013, arguing the government had violated its responsibility to consult with first nations on constitutional and treaty issues. The B.C. Supreme Court rejected that argument in October, 2013, but the first nation is now appealing that ruling before the Federal Court of Appeal.

    (read the full article at Huffington Post)

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    • Geopolitics/War

    Bush/Cheney Created Conditions That Led Directly to ISIL

    Robert Palmer
    Huffington Post : September 15, 2014

    It takes a lot of gall for people like Dick Cheney to utter even one critical word about President Obama’s strategy to eliminate the threat of ISIL in the Middle East.

    In fact, it was the unnecessary Bush/Cheney Iraq War that created the conditions that led directly to the rise of the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL).

    Former George H.W. Bush Secretary of State James Baker said as much on this week’s edition of “Meet the Press.” He noted that after the first President Bush had ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, the U.S. had refrained from marching on Baghdad precisely to avoid kicking over the sectarian hornet’s nest that was subsequently unleashed by the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq in 2003.

    But it wasn’t just the War in Iraq itself that set the stage for the subsequent 12 years of renewed, high-intensity sectarian strife between Sunni’s and Shiites in the Middle East. It was also what came after.

    Bush’s “de-Baathification program” eliminated all vestiges of Sunni power in Iraqi society and set the stage for the Sunni insurrection against American occupation and the new Shiite-led government. Bush disbanded the entire Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army and bureaucracy. He didn’t change it. He didn’t make it more inclusive of Shiites and Kurds. He just disbanded it. It is no accident that two of the top commanders of today’s ISIL are former commanders in the Saddam-era Iraqi military.

    General Petraeus took steps to reverse these policies with his “Sunni Awakening” programs that engaged the Sunni tribes against what was then known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. But the progress he made ultimately collapsed because the Bush/Cheney regime helped install Nouri Al-Maliki as Prime Minister who systematically disenfranchised Sunnis throughout Iraq.

    And that’s not all. The War in Iraq — which had nothing whatsoever to do with “terrorism” when it was launched — created massive numbers of terrorists that otherwise would not have dreamed of joining extremist organizations. It did so by killing massive numbers of Iraqis, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, imprisoning thousands, and convincing many residents of the Middle East that the terrorist narrative was correct: that the U.S. and the West were really about taking Muslim lands.

    And after all, contrary to Dick Cheney’s absurd assertion that U.S. forces would be greeted in Iraq as “liberators,” no one likes a foreign nation to occupy their country.

    The War did more than any propagandist could possibly do to radicalize vulnerable young people. And by setting off wave after wave of sectarian slaughter it created blood feuds that will never be forgiven.

    The Iraq War — and the Sunni power vacuum caused first by U.S. policies and then Al Maliki — created the perfect conditions that allowed a vicious band of extremists to take huge swaths of territory.

    And now many of the same people who caused this foreign policy disaster have the audacity to criticize President Obama’s measured efforts to clean up the mess they created. And they do so often without ever saying what they themselves would do to solve the horrific problems that they created.

    It reminds you of a bunch of arsonists standing at the scene of a fire criticizing the techniques used by the firefighters who are trying to extinguish the blaze they themselves have set.

    (read the full article at Huffington Post)

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    Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Privacy

    The U.S. Government’s Secret Plans to Spy for American Corporations

    Glenn Greenwald
    The Intercept : September 5, 2014

    Throughout the last year, the U.S. government has repeatedly insisted that it does not engage in economic and industrial espionage, in an effort to distinguish its own spying from China’s infiltrations of Google, Nortel, and other corporate targets. So critical is this denial to the U.S. government that last August, an NSA spokesperson emailed The Washington Post to say (emphasis in original): “The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”

    After that categorical statement to the Post, the NSA was caught spying on plainly financial targets such as the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras; economic summits; international credit card and banking systems; the EU antitrust commissioner investigating Google, Microsoft, and Intel; and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In response, the U.S. modified its denial to acknowledge that it does engage in economic spying, but unlike China, the spying is never done to benefit American corporations.

    Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, responded to the Petrobras revelations by claiming: “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters…. What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of—or give intelligence we collect to—U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”

    But a secret 2009 report issued by Clapper’s own office explicitly contemplates doing exactly that. The document, the 2009 Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review—provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—is a fascinating window into the mindset of America’s spies as they identify future threats to the U.S. and lay out the actions the U.S. intelligence community should take in response. It anticipates a series of potential scenarios the U.S. may face in 2025, from a “China/Russia/India/Iran centered bloc [that] challenges U.S. supremacy” to a world in which “identity-based groups supplant nation-states,” and games out how the U.S. intelligence community should operate in those alternative futures—the idea being to assess “the most challenging issues [the U.S.] could face beyond the standard planning cycle.”

    One of the principal threats raised in the report is a scenario “in which the United States’ technological and innovative edge slips”— in particular, “that the technological capacity of foreign multinational corporations could outstrip that of U.S. corporations.” Such a development, the report says “could put the United States at a growing—and potentially permanent—disadvantage in crucial areas such as energy, nanotechnology, medicine, and information technology.”

    How could U.S. intelligence agencies solve that problem? The report recommends “a multi-pronged, systematic effort to gather open source and proprietary information through overt means, clandestine penetration (through physical and cyber means), and counterintelligence” (emphasis added). In particular, the DNI’s report envisions “cyber operations” to penetrate “covert centers of innovation” such as R&D facilities.

    In a graphic describing an “illustrative example,” the report heralds “technology acquisition by all means.” Some of the planning relates to foreign superiority in surveillance technology, but other parts are explicitly concerned with using cyber-espionage to bolster the competitive advantage of U.S. corporations. The report thus envisions a scenario in which companies from India and Russia work together to develop technological innovation, and the U.S. intelligence community then “conducts cyber operations” against “research facilities” in those countries, acquires their proprietary data, and then “assesses whether and how its findings would be useful to U.S. industry”

    (read the full article including source documents at The Intercept)

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    Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

    Harper government asks public servants to delete emails

    Mike De Souza
    The Star: August 27, 2014

    The Conservative government is telling public servants to delete emails with no “business value,” opening the door to the destruction of potentially valuable records, say critics.

    Employees must still preserve information as required by law, a government spokeswoman says, but instructions obtained by the Star show that employees were being told to delete some reference materials related to their work, including memos and copies of departmental documents.

    Several departments have issued the instructions in recent weeks to delete records as part of a new two-gigabyte limit imposed on email inboxes for all federal employees based on a new standard , introduced by the secretariat of Treasury Board President Tony Clement .

    “Clean up your mailbox and delete everything of no business value,” said a recent message sent to Environment Canada employees this summer.

    The Environment Canada message included a poster listing different categories of what could be deleted and what should be preserved.

    Documents “approved by your manager” were among the records that the department told employees to save. But some business-related emails fell into a “transitory” category that also includes “messages from your friends” or an “invitation to a party.”

    The Environment Canada poster described these as “transitory reference” materials — which could include memorandums, copies of government reports, or reference material for subsequent work. The poster, which identified memos with an image of a paper airplane, showed these types of “transitory” documents going into a trash can.

    The NDP’s access to information critic, MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay) , slammed the instructions, warning that they might erase evidence of political interference or mistakes by managers prior to decisions on federal policies.

    “We’ve seen many times where draft reports may contain very vital political information that could be changed, either through political interference or an attempt to whitewash an issue,” Angus said in an interview.

    (read the full article at The Star)

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    Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Original, Tyranny

    Obama Pursuing Global Corporate Welfare Climate Accord

    AlternativeFreePress.com

    The Obama administration is pushing for an international climate change agreement to funnel more tax dollars into the hands of large corporations. The New York Times reports that despite the fact that the Constitution requires a president obtain approval from a two-thirds majority of the Senate, Obama plans on sidestepping his oath with “some legal and political magic”.

    The climate accord would legally require countries to enact domestic climate change policies as well as make voluntarily pledges to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money “to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change”.

    That may sound nice, but there are several reasons why this is a problem…

    1. Foreign Aid is Corporate Welfare.

    In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins describes how he would convince the government leaders of underdeveloped countries to accept huge loans they could never pay off. He explains how those countries were then pressured politically so much that they were effectively neutralized and their economies crippled. Perkins describes the role of an Economic Hit Man as “a highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.”

    Let’s look at an example of how nice sounding green initiatives are often just corporate welfare…

    The BC’s Pacific Carbon Trust takes about $14 million dollars from taxpayers per year and transfers it to large corporations.

    Jordan Bateman with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation explains that “taxpayer money flowed exclusively into the pockets of corporations, including some of the largest companies in the province. Lafarge, a $20 billion company, was paid by the Trust for 22,998 carbon credits. Encana, an $8.8 billion company, sold 84,276 credits. Canfor, a $2.5 billion company, sold 41,573 credits. Other sellers included TimberWest and Interfor.”

    2. Binding Agreements & Loss Of Sovereignty.

    While this climate agreement may not yet legally bind countries into the corporate welfare scheme, that is the endgame.

    The New York Times reports that officials fear this type of agreement which will not will not bind countries to spend billions of dollars. They desperately want a binding agreement. Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania is quoted “Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change… We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

    These international agreements seek to destroy nations sovereignty, they attempt to override laws of local, regional and national governments… and this has been planned for a long time.

    The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 by David Rockefeller, it’s members include business leaders, Heads of State, UN bureaucrats, diplomats, politicians and government officials from all over the world.

    In 1990 The Club of Rome published The First Global Revolution, where they outlined how they would create or exaggerate environmental threats with the intention of manipulating the public into giving up their sovereignty to one world government:

    “The common enemy of humanity is man.
    In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
    with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
    water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
    dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

    3. Debt.

    This climate agreement is being presented under the guise of rich countries helping countries in need, but really it is countries already in debt, getting into more debt, in order to get other countries into debt.

    The “rich” countries are not really rich when you consider their debt, every dollar of aid given is borrowed with interest owing and compounding. Increasing debt and devaluing the dollar.

    The “developing” countries can certainly use help, but the strings attached to this type of help will leave them with more debt than they can handle. This will leave them vulnerable to exploitation and allow corporations to pillage resources.

    Banksters (central banks) create fiat currency and loan it to the government, it is then given to banksters (world bank / IMF) who loan it to developing countries. Debt on top of debt, interest plus more interest.

    Written by Alternative Free Press
    Creative Commons License
    Obama Pursuing Global Corporate Welfare Climate Accord by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

    Sources:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/us/politics/obama-pursuing-climate-accord-in-lieu-of-treaty.html

    http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jordan-bateman/carbon-bc_b_1723907.html
    http://www.green-agenda.com/globalrevolution.html

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man

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    Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War

    What Have We Accomplished in Iraq?

    Ron Paul: August 18, 2014

    We have been at war with Iraq for 24 years, starting with Operations Desert Shield and Storm in 1990. Shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait that year, the propaganda machine began agitating for a US attack on Iraq. We all remember the appearance before Congress of a young Kuwaiti woman claiming that the Iraqis were ripping Kuwaiti babies from incubators. The woman turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and the story was false, but it was enough to turn US opposition in favor of an attack.

    This month, yet another US president – the fifth in a row – began bombing Iraq. He is also placing in US troops on the ground despite promising not to do so.

    The second Iraq war in 2003 cost the US some two trillion dollars. According to estimates, more than one million deaths have occurred as a result of that war. Millions of tons of US bombs have fallen in Iraq almost steadily since 1991.

    What have we accomplished? Where are we now, 24 years later? We are back where we started, at war in Iraq!

    The US overthrew Saddam Hussein in the second Iraq war and put into place a puppet, Nouri al-Maliki. But after eight years, last week the US engineered a coup against Maliki to put in place yet another puppet. The US accused Maliki of misrule and divisiveness, but what really irritated the US government was his 2011 refusal to grant immunity to the thousands of US troops that Obama wanted to keep in the country.

    Early this year, a radical Islamist group, ISIS, began taking over territory in Iraq, starting with Fallujah. The organization had been operating in Syria, strengthened by US support for the overthrow of the Syrian government. ISIS obtained a broad array of sophisticated US weapons in Syria, very often capturing them from other US-approved opposition groups. Some claim that lax screening criteria allowed some ISIS fighters to even participate in secret CIA training camps in Jordan and Turkey.

    This month, ISIS became the target of a new US bombing campaign in Iraq. The pretext for the latest US attack was the plight of a religious minority in the Kurdish region currently under ISIS attack. The US government and media warned that up to 100,000 from this group, including some 40,000 stranded on a mountain, could be slaughtered if the US did not intervene at once. Americans unfortunately once again fell for this propaganda and US bombs began to fall. Last week, however, it was determined that only about 2,000 were on the mountain and many of them had been living there for years! They didn’t want to be rescued!

    This is not to say that the plight of many of these people is not tragic, but why is it that the US government did not say a word when three out of four Christians were forced out of Iraq during the ten year US occupation? Why has the US said nothing about the Christians slaughtered by its allies in Syria? What about all the Palestinians killed in Gaza or the ethnic Russians killed in east Ukraine?

    The humanitarian situation was cynically manipulated by the Obama administration — and echoed by the US media — to provide a reason for the president to attack Iraq again. This time it was about yet another regime change, breaking Kurdistan away from Iraq and protection of the rich oil reserves there, and acceptance of a new US military presence on the ground in the country.

    President Obama has started another war in Iraq and Congress is completely silent. No declaration, no authorization, not even a debate. After 24 years we are back where we started. Isn’t it about time to re-think this failed interventionist policy? Isn’t it time to stop trusting the government and its war propaganda? Isn’t it time to leave Iraq alone?

    Banksters, Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Health/Environment, Privacy, Tyranny

    Canada Sacrifices Citizens For Corporations ; “Highly Problematic” Trade Deal Leaked

    Canada-EU Trade Deal Text Leaked By German TV

    Daniel Tencer
    The Huffington Post: August 13, 2014

    A German news show has published what it says is the text of the Canada-EU free trade deal.

    More than 520 pages of the 1,500-page document were posted to the website of German TV network ARD’s news show Tagesschau on Wednesday.

    According to some experts now poring through the document, it appears Canada caved on the issue of patent protection for drugs.

    The EU had been pushing Canada to lengthen patent protections for drugs, a move that was estimated to cost Canadians $900 million to $1.65 billion annually. The Conservative government in Ottawa has promised to compensate provinces for added drug costs, but no word yet on whether individuals will be compensated as well.

    Council for Canadians political director Brent Patterson called the document “highly problematic,” adding the language specifically in the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) chapter is “undemocratic.”

    “It’s the same provision that we’ve seen in NAFTA that has been so disastrous,” Patterson told HuffPost Canada.

    “In terms of procurement, there is nothing that we can see about cities being excepted as so many had asked to have done.”

    Patterson said several municipal governments including Toronto, Victoria, Hamilton and Red Deer asked to be exempted from CETA rules that banned “buy local” policies and other tools to support local jobs and development through public spending.

    The Federation of Canadian Municipalities declined to discuss the text.

    “Municipal interests in CETA and in all future trade agreements must be protected. FCM will not comment at this time on the leaked document,” said FCM President Brad Woodside.

    Though Patterson thinks the documents should have been released earlier, he said the leak would allow groups like his own to start talking to Canadians and build opposition momentum – with possible support from the Liberals party and NDP.

    “If the Germans are not satisfied with this, we can see a rocky road ahead,” Patterson said.

    Several industry groups contacted by HuffPost Canada said they were not commenting on the leaked text. The Canadian Construction Association, the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association and the Fédération des producteurs de lait du Québec all declined to discuss the document.

    Scott Sinclair with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called the procurement provisions in the document “the most extensive set of commitments that Canada has ever made” – reaching down to the municipal level.

    “It will interfere with, and potentially end, the use of procurement as an economic development policy tool and interfere with municipal governments, universities or hospitals who, for example, want to implement buy-local food purchasing policies,” he told HuffPost Canada.

    It’s “overkill,” he added.

    According to University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, the leaked text addresses concerns many activists have about ISDS.

    Critics argued that the trade deal would create an international body through which corporations would be able to sue governments if those companies felt a country’s laws violated its rights under the trade deal. They say these sorts of dispute mechanisms essentially usurp a country’s sovereignty.

    The leaked deal includes a clause that allows Canada to review the dispute mechanism after three years. Geist described the clause as “weak.”

    A spokesman for International Trade Minister Ed Fast refused to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents, but insisted that negotiators have already gone to great lengths to reassure the public that the deal is good for both sides.

    (read the full article at The Huffington Post)

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    Geopolitics/War

    Blowback in Iraq: How U.S. Proxy Wars Led to the Rise of ISIS

    Joshua Cook
    Ben Swann : August 13, 2014

    The U.S. and its regional allies armed and trained “moderate” Sunni rebels to oust President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in order to weaken the Iranian/Russian influence in the Middle East. Then those “moderate” Sunni rebels became more radical and joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) which has emerged as the largest, wealthiest and most-radical terrorist organization in the region.

    The strategy of arming radical Sunni Muslims has been an abysmal failure, yet Hillary Clinton and neoconservatives like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham continue to push their Brzezinski-inspired foreign policy. In a swipe at the Obama administration, Clinton said, “Failure to help Syrian rebels led to the rise of ISIS.”

    Last Sunday, both McCain and Graham appeared on the Sunday talk shows to warn about the “direct threat” of ISIS.

    Graham told Fox News, “The Islamic State is ‘an existential threat’’ to our homeland.” Graham asked, “Do we really want to let America be attacked?”

    What the mainstream media fails to ask war hawks like Graham is what made ISIS a threat in the first place?

    What the mainstream media is not telling you is that both Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham played roles in strengthening ISIS and other Islamic insurgents in Syria.

    ISIS success is due to the support they received from the CIA and key U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf — Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Both countries remain to be a critical financial support for al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Recently, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar of openly funding the Sunni Muslim insurgents.

    McCain still praises the Saudis, despite the known fact of its state-sponsored terror network and funding sources.

    At the Munich Security Conference, McCain said, “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar and for our Qatari friends.”

    According to Steve Clemons writing for The Atlantic, “ISIS, in fact, may have been a major part of Bandar’s covert-ops strategy in Syria.” Clemons notes that according to one senior Qatari official, “ISIS has been a Saudi project.”

    The Wall Street Journal reported that the Saudi ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir, recruited both McCain and Graham to “put  pressure on the administration to get more involved in Syria.”

    So why are U.S. Senators working with the same actors who are behind ISIS instead of working to cut off the Islamic funding mechanisms?

    Not only has the U.S. created an unholy alliance with states who sponsor terrorism, it has strengthened ISIS by training and arming radical Sunni insurgents who join ISIS, that share similar goals of creating an Islamic caliphate.

     

    The CIA trains and arms Islamic rebels making matters worse.

    There is no real distinction between moderate rebels and ISIS. In fact, there are an endless parade of reports that the U.S.-supported “moderate rebels” in the Free Syrian Army (FSA)  have joined ISIS. See here, here and here.

    The FSA, al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front and other Syrian rebels are joining forces with a unifying goal of creating an Islamic state.

    Despite the reality on the ground in Syria and Iraq, politicians continue to advance their failed policies and the mainstream media never challenges them. They refuse to accept that arming Sunni rebels prolongs the conflict and makes matters worse.

    The foreign policy strategy of arming radical Islamist to fight in American proxy wars postulated by Clinton, McCain and Graham is  not based on any winning strategy but is based on political distraction by averting attention away from their failures.

    The blame game is alive in Washington, D.C.. But their ideas are dangerous for the American people who face a challenging world.

    Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch, said that the scheme of arming rebels is “just wrong” and it’s a strategy that won’t work. He noted that an “external support for insurgents typically makes conflicts longer and bloodier.”

    “It’s difficult to produce a single example in modern history of a strategy of arming rebels actually succeeding,” said Lynch.

    (read the full article at Ben Swann)

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