I noticed an attack on this letter (below) in the comments at third party media basically smearing Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) by association with Bernard Kouchner, a man that departed the organization more than 35 years ago over philosophical differences. I had supported Doctors Without Borders because they had been apolitical, and largely neutral in conflicts. This neutrality had begun a process of erosion in Syria. Unlike the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, where there was no question of which belligerent controlled the air power responsible (NATO’s USA), and where the organization called for an independent, third party investigation, those actors responsible for the attacks concerning the MSF aligned clinics in Syria are not as convincing and clear, arguably creating even more pressing demand for impartial, third party investigation.
Following these most recent attacks on clinics aligned with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Syria, Mego Terzian, President of MSF France, immediately blamed Russia and Assad. MSF International President has gone on record also blaming Russian aligned forces, stating “It was probably carried out by the Syrian-government-led coalition that is predominantly active in the region.” This statement of Dr Liu is disingenuous. Turkey is a major player in its support for jihadi militia in that very area and has a vested interest in information operations intended to undermine the coalition supporting the Assad regime. This is the purpose of false flag attacks. Recent history demands if the finger of superficial appearance had pointed to the NATO aligned nations, there would be calls for impartial investigation rather than immediate trial and conviction by propaganda operations perpetrated in western media.
Relevant to this preceding, it is a fairly safe presumption all high profile international non-governmental organizations will be targets of intelligence agencies for diverse purpose. However there is a large qualitative difference between that organization and the organization which, on the whole, has been tipped by intelligence to a point of co-option; where the organization itself has become the intelligence agency operations asset. Médecins Sans Frontières would appear to be pointed towards this co-option. Here is my response:
Dear MSF
A monthly donor of many years, I feel an explanation is in order for my cancellation and further refusal to participate as a MSF “Field Partner.” I am a former military special operations intelligence professional and anti-corruption investigator of many years. Based on my expertise in open source intelligence analysis and closely following several of the ongoing conflicts, including Ukraine and SYRIA, it has become clear MSF is becoming a tool for geopolitical ends. Either you’ve been penetrated by intelligence agencies for this purpose of promoting false flag information operations or your organization is being manipulated to same effect. I cannot, with clear conscious, be a party to this with further contributions.
The several NATO intelligence agencies are in full force pursuing anti-Russian propaganda operations, which likely include the recent attacks on MSF aligned Syrian clinics; purposeful and professional operations intended to smear Russia and President Putin for purposes of generating political capital for pursuit of geopolitical manipulations. Your organization immediately pointing the finger at Assad and/or the Russians, without time taken to properly investigate, is unethical.
NATO aligned intelligence agency false flag examples provided:
NATO’s Turkey suppressing investigation into their intelligence agency, MIT, providing sarin gas to al Nusra (al Qaida) that killed 1,400 Syrians at Ghouta, blamed on the Assad regime, in August, 2013. Turkish parliamentarians complain of the suppressed facts:
The Maidan snipers in Kiev trained by the CIA according to Member of European Parliament, backed by a leaked phone call between the EU foreign policy chief and the Estonian Foreign minister revealing the snipers were aligned with the new regime in Kiev. This crime had been blamed on the Russian aligned preceding government.
&
The crimes in Syria against MSF aligned facilities serve the same propaganda purposes and the Erdogan government cannot be ruled out as committing them, whereas it is NOT in the Russian interest to perpetrate these attacks. Here is a list of Turkish support for bad actors in Syria compiled by Jihad Watch:
It is sad to see MSF go the route of some other organizations and become a pawn of dirty players in geopolitics. I suggest your organization pursue a professional investigation to determine how, and by who, you’ve become manipulated to both a stooge and minion of evil.
“The history of the great events of this world are scarcely more than a history of crime” -Voltaire
note: since I’d written this piece, the Erdogan administration (Turkish government) seized Today’s Zaman newspaper and killed the linked story on the gas attack at Ghouta, Syria, forwarded to MSF in the letter. Anticipating some possibility like this, I had preserved screen shots and the story’s complete text which now may be found by clicking HERE
A shot at the CIA engineered coup d’état in Ukraine. More information/documentation below film-maker Paul Moreira’s damning rebuttal of the critics attacking his work:
The film western intelligence doesn’t want you to see
Trailer at vimeo; The English sub-titled and original French versions of the film by Paul Moreira almost immediately taken down by youtube following its release by Canal+ TV in France. Now, via ‘LiveLeaks’ embed, Russian Insider magazine has posted the English subtitled version, you can watch it HERE. An interesting aside, at ‘LiveLeaks‘ the film is accompanied by this patent disinformation:
“Documentary: Ukraine – Masks of revolution. Eng. Subs. VPE presents highly anticipated, contorversial (to some) documentary about so called Maidan revolution. Movie itself has been produced by high ranking agents of Kremlin inside of French Canal+ TV channel”
^ This small snippet (blatant lie, actually) is a smoking gun LiveLeaks is penetrated/co-opted by western intelligence; intent on discrediting Moreira’s work. This film has Kiev’s ‘authorities’ (empowered by CIA backed neo-nazis) squealing like electrocuted pigs, so it hit a nerve.
After vicious attacks on the film by neocon media, Moreira put forward his defense:
When I started this investigation on Ukraine, I was astonished to discover the degree to which the massacre in Odessa [May 2, 2014] had faded from memory. Forty five people were killed in a huge fire in the heart of a major European city in the middle of the 21st century. Everything was filmed by dozens of cameras and cell phones. Yet around me, no one remembered.
Forty five Ukrainians of Russian origin died in a fire inside a building [the Trades Union House in the city center of Odessa] caused by the Molotov cocktails of Ukrainian nationalist militias. After a quick investigation, I discovered that the event had not been censored. It had been addressed, discussed, but never investigated. As though too embarrassing to discuss.
Why no investigation? Probably because the victims were of Russian origin. These victims were reported as “persons” but without knowing who they were, who killed them and why they were dead. “Persons” who were nobodies.
In speaking of these deaths, our democracies should have expressed some sympathy, officially, solemnly. There should have been strong reactions by chancelleries. Press releases by ministries of foreign affairs. [However], following the Russian invasion of Crimea, Russian-speaking populations in the conflict were assigned the roles of villains.
What happened on that May 2, 2014, in Odessa? I discovered the answer after viewing hours of video shootings, interviewing dozens of witnesses, finding victims and aggressors and comparing the stories until I pieced together facts that make sense of this fury. Important fact: I interviewed and have broadcast only direct witnesses of events – the people I saw on videos – in order to filter to some extent the exaggerations and lies that arise in such a circumstance, on the side of the attackers as well as victims. The result of this painstaking work is at the heart of the film to be broadcast Monday evening [February 1] by Canal Plus [Canal +].
During my investigation into this massacre of little exposure, I saw the importance of Ukrainian nationalist militias. They were at the forefront of street fighting on Maidan Square (January-February 2014], and later formed battalions to fight Russian troops in the east of the country. But these battalions were merged into the army. They did not exercise the same discipline. They were able to serve as auxiliaries to the government; or become a parallel police. And, yes, in their ranks, the signs of neo-Nazi ideology were obvious.
My investigation went against the commonly accepted narrative. I knew I was going to meet strong opposition, that we would be accused of playing into the hands of Putin, to voice elements of Russian propaganda. I did not expect to meet with such huge denial, bordering on hysteria at times. On a Ukrainian website, I am called a “terrorist” in the pay of the Russian secret service. The site calls for a ban on the film. Even the Ukrainian ambassador to France pressured Canal Plus [not to screen the film]. That is what surprises me the most. For it seems to me that Ukraine must ask itself about these paramilitary groups. They are, as stated in the film, the greatest threat to Ukrainian democracy. To renounce saying what one knows to be the truth because “it plays into Russian propaganda” is to become a propagandist oneself. One omits, not because we are liars but because we are full of good intentions. But never forget that from such omissions, the worst conspiracy theories are born.
In France, the accusations against the film have come mainly from two militant blogs and an unusually violent writing by the reporter in charge of Ukraine in Le Monde, Benoit Vitkine. In all three publications, the arguments are similar. It is said I did not nuance enough my perception of the extreme right, which ranges from dark brown neo-Nazism to light-beige nationalism. I exaggerated the importance of the paramilitary groups, armed with Kalashnikovs and sometimes with tanks. I have not stressed enough their heroic role in their fight against the Russians. I exaggerated the influence of Americans in the regime change [of February 2014].
And then certain factual errors are pinpointed. I’ll try to answer them here.
To question the rigor of my documentary, Benoit Vitkine cites one, sole example. He accuses me of having created out of my imagination the manufacture of a new generation of tanks by the nationalist battalion Azov (for which he seems to feel a fond indulgence). But it’s the truth. Andriy Biletsky, the head of the battalion, sang to me its praises [manufactured tank] with much pride. 1.2 meters of armored shield in the front and steering video cameras used to steer it. The technical details of this new beast of war can be found here.
Benoit Vitkine is well aware that Andriy Biletsky comes from the most radical extreme right. His electoral standing is low (although he is a Rada deputy), but his standing in steel and in battle-hardened men is strong.
Then Benoit Vitkine insinuates, without citing anything in support, that my purpose is to highlight “the installation of a new fascism in Ukraine”. Vitkine must be very angry to write such things. I never said that fascism had settled in Ukraine. The key phrase of my documentary is: “The Ukrainian revolution has created a monster that will soon turn against its creator.” And then I tell how far-right groups attacked the parliament and killed three policemen in August 2015. I have never suggested that the attackers were in power. Even if those who are in power were able to use them.
The only “good point” which Benoit Vitkine wants to award me is that I worked on the massacre of Odessa, a “frequently overlooked episode”. You said it yourself, dear colleague…
Anna Colin Lebedev writes a blog on Mediapart.fr. She, on the other hand, reproaches me precisely for my treatment of the “drama” of Odessa. She is careful to never write the word “massacre” or “butchery”, to never precisely name the savagery of the murders. Anna Colin Lebedev affirms that this “drama” is not at all ignored. The only proof she offers are papers published … a year after the fact. Those of Le Monde (Benoit Vitkine) and The Economist. A blogger, Olivier Berruyer, conducted an analysis of article headings in the days immediately following the massacre. This analysis is available on his website. It is most eloquent.
Anna Colin Lebedev accuses me of creating a story “centered on the tears of victims”. That’s true, I gave voice to a mother who lost her 17 year old son, Vadim Papura. She spoke reluctantly, she was certain that I would not use her statements, that the West does not care about their fate. I also give voice to Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom even voice remorse. I interviewed eyewitnesses from all sides. According to Anna, everything is the fault of the police, who were not sufficiently effective [in stopping the violence that day]. This is what the film should have focused on, she says. Not on militiamen who threw Molotov cocktails on the trade union building or who finished off the wounded lying on the ground [after jumping from windows to escape the burning building]. Not on the fact that none of the killers has been imprisoned and that the Ukrainian government has sabotaged any judicial inquiry, as recalled in the article in The Economist [May 8, 2014] which she kindly quotes as reference but which she probably has not taken the time to read.
That’s it for the specific criticisms. From there, we descend into tiny details.
Thus, Anna Colin Lebedev tells me that I mention the presence of the symbol of Azov on Maidan while the battalion had yet to be created. It will be formed three months later. Sure, but for me, it was just a name change: the symbol was everywhere on Maidan, it is the same symbol as the group ‘Patriots of Ukraine’, who have the same leader, Biletsky, the same men and who will go on to form a military battalion to fight in Mariupol [Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine].
So for clarity, I made the editorial decision not to go into such levels of detail. The fact that this famous [Azov] symbol is borrowed from an SS division, Das Reich, does not seem to move my critics.
Igor Moysichuk, according to Anna Colin-Lebedev, was not the spokesman for Pravy Sektor [Right Sector] however he was introduced as such in this televised debate. Igor Moysichuk is a member of nationalist splinter groups that sailed between Azov and Pravy Sektor but he was mostly a crook playing for his personal account. He joined the Radical party of Oleg Lyashko and he was arrested, in front of our camera, after extorting 100,000 Hryvnia from some guy from his party.
In the blog Comité Ukraine [Ukraine Committee] by Renaud Rebardy, I am accused of not reporting that the Azov battalion had integrated into the regular army. Renaud Rebardy will have misheard and, especially, misunderstood the nature of relations between the Ukrainian government and Azov. Here is a verbatim commentary from the film when I talk to Azov: “Officially, this brigade obeys the Ukrainian national army. And yet, many of them remain masked.”
And this is what their leader Andriy Biletsky told me about their financial means: “Well, if we talk about finances, for acquiring armaments, it is provided by the state, as is part of our equipment. The rest comes from the work of activists among whom there are small and medium businessmen. They invest money and make all of this possible. ”
During the interview and in comments that I finally edited out, Biletsky utters a veiled threat against the government he deems too corrupt. The subtlety of Azov is that they are officially in the army but they retain a wide margin of autonomy.
Then Renaud Rebardy says that there have “never been talks” to remove Russian as an official language in 13 Ukrainian regions. The facts: the Ukrainian parliament proposed to do so on February 23, 2014, and the day after, the war started. Russian-speaking populations were worried about their future and Putin took advantage of that to launch military manoeuvres. On February 28, the [interim] Ukrainian president repealed the measure. But it was too late, the devil had escaped from the box.
The same Renaud Rebardy chides me for reporting that the new Ukrainian Minister of Finance is a former U.S. diplomat. Natalie Jaresko became a naturalized Ukrainian in December 2014 in order to join the government. Before that, she worked first as a diplomat at the State Department, specializing in Eastern European countries, from 1989 to 1995, and then she maintained a strong relationship with the U.S. government after taking over the presidency of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), an investment fund that invests money from a U.S. state agency (USAID) in the Ukrainian economy. She remained there (in addition to her position at the private investment fund she ran, Horizon Capital) until she took a job in the Ukrainian government [as finance minister]. These are not trivial matters, correct?
Benoit Vitkine accuses me of reporting that the new ministers of the economy are “pro-business”. Yet this is the politics from which they declare themselves “aggressively pro-business,” I have it in my video recordings. This explains, for example, the fourfold increase in natural gas prices. Among other things.
Rebardy also accuses me of being too harsh with Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the Svoboda Party. I describe him: “Historically, he belongs to the neo-Nazi movement.” This man has many times said that he wants to rid the country of the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia”; he often uses the term “Yid”. He was also the founder of the Social National Party (does that name remind you of something?).
Another criticism came from the militant Euromaidan blog: I gave voice to Alexis Albu, a communist activist of Odessa whom they accuse of being homophobic and red-brown.
Why did I interview Albu? Not because of his opinions but because I discovered on amateur video his presence in the building of Odessa on the famous May 2, 2014. And let me remind you, my goal was to find people who are seen in videos and then gather their comments on what they saw. I try to establish the facts. What interested me in Albu is that we see him walking out of the union building intact and shortly thereafter, he is laying on the ground, gravely wounded in the head. What happened in between?
Finally Anna Colin Lebedev noted a sentence written in the presentation of the website of Premières Lignes announcing my documentary: “No one has really asked who they (the Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries) were.” This sentence is obviously factually false. But if she saw the movie and, most of all, listened to it, she knows that this sentence is not in there. It was written to “sell” the film on the website of the production house and can therefore be attributed to clumsy marketing.
All this said, if one sits at the level global public perception, it is clear that the general public knows nothing about the importance of Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups, nor the existence of the massacre of Odessa of May 2, 2014. That’s because this issue has been underreported (which is not to say not reported at all). We know from the Russian side, it is said that far-right nationalists went to fight in the Donbass. But we know less on the other side.
To conclude, I invite everyone to watch the film on Monday night on Canal Plus and make your own judgment. Because the people who insult me and threaten me on social networks are precisely those who have not seen the documentary. They imagined it. Faith is a powerful drug.
(Preceding is the statement of film-maker Paul Moreira)
*
The evidence only continues to grow Ukraine’s Yanukovych government had been overthrown by forces antithetical to democratic principles from the very beginning. Concerning the (separate to Odessa) massacre on ‘The Maidan’, Polish MEP [Member of European Parliament] states in an interview the Maidan snipers were trained in Poland in a joint operation with USA intelligence services.
Question: “[you are] a supporter of the thesis it was a CIA operation?”
Answer: “Maidan was also our operation. The snipers were trained in Poland”
The original interview transcript in Polish language HERE
A reasonable English language summary of the interview by PRAVDA:
A leaked phone call between the European Union’s foreign affairs chief Cathrine Ashton and NATO’s Estonian foreign minister, also indicates it was people aligned with the new USA supported Ukrainian administration were behind the snipers who killed both protestors and police during coup d’état in Kiev. (conversation begins about 2 minutes into this youtube posting)
It is the woman handing out cookies in Paul Moreira’s film, Victoria Nuland, brags to Chevron and Exxon-Mobil her USA Department of State has spent $5 billion prepping Ukraine for the coup d’état
Post coup d’état leadership assignments? Here’s our (CIA liaised) Department of State’s Nuland again with her somewhat infamous (‘Fuck the EU’ inclusive) instructions to the USA ambassador on Ukraine:
Nuland’s Ukrainian Nazi associate Oleh Tyahnybok (left), the sidelined Klitschko (center) and the named CIA choice for prime minister “Yats” (Arseniy Yatsenyuk, below, on right)
This article, reprinted with the consent of the author, has been banned from a wide variety of ‘progressive’ news outlets. It is, in my opinion, one of the most important pieces of information people should have absorbed. Dr Bramhall’s reporting on this subject is independently consistent with my own research on ‘color revolutions’ (my appended observations follow Dr Bramhall’s article.)
The CIA and Nonviolent Resistance
One important aspect of the “diversity of tactics” debate (i.e. the debate whether to be exclusively nonviolent) in the Occupy movement relates to mounting evidence of the role CIA and Pentagon-funded foundations and think tanks play in funding and promoting nonviolent resistance training.
The two major US foundations promoting nonviolence, both overseas and domestically, are the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). Both receive major corporate and/or government funding. The latter comes mainly through CIA “pass-through” foundations. While the ICNC is funded mainly by the private fortune of hedge fund multimillionaire (junk bond king Michael Milken’s second in command) Peter Ackerman, the AEI has received funding from the Rand Corporation and the Department of Defense, as well as various CIA-linked foundations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the US Institute of Peace and the Ford Foundation (read here on The Ford Foundation and the CIA), which all have a long history of collaborating with the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA in destabilizing governments unfriendly to US interests.
This is a strategy Frances Stonor Saunders outlines in her pivotal Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. According to Sanders, right wing corporate-backed foundations and the CIA have been funding the non-communist left since the late sixties, in the hope of drowning out and marginalizing the voice of more militant leftists.
Gene Sharp, the Fervent Anticommunist
Much of this debate focuses around the American godfather of nonviolent resistance, Gene Sharp, the founder and director of the Albert Einstein Institution. Sharp’s handbooks on nonviolent protest were widely disseminated in the Eastern Europe color revolutions, in the Arab spring revolutions and in the Occupy movement in the US (see Nonviolence in the Service of Imperialism). Unfortunately Sharp has become a decoy in this debate, deflecting attention from the larger question of whether the US government is actively financing and promoting the work of the AEI, the ICIC and other groups that promote nonviolent resistance, to the exclusion of other militant tactics. The question is extremely important, in my view, because it possibly explains the rigid and dogmatic attitude in the US progressive movement regarding nonviolence.
Is Military-Intelligence Funding Compatible with Progressive Politics?
The institutional nonviolence clique has cleverly refocused the debate on whether Sharp, who is eighty-three, is a CIA agent and whether he actively participated in US-funded destabilization efforts in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran and elsewhere that resulted in so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions. The obvious answer to both questions is no. The more important question is why the alternative media and “official” progressive movement embrace Sharp unconditionally as a fellow progressive without a careful look at his past or his ideological beliefs. Sharp has never made any secret of his fervent anticommunist views. He also makes no secret of the funding he has received from the Defense Department; the Rand Corporation; CIA-linked foundations, such as NED, the IRI and the US Institute of Peace; and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. All this information is readily available from the AEI website.
Thierry Meyssan’s 2005 Expose
The current brouhaha over Gene Sharp was first triggered by an article, The Albert Einstein Institution: Nonviolence According to the CIA, Thierry Meyssan published on Voltaire Net in October 2005. Meyssan, a French intellectual and political activist, first gained international prominence in 2002 by publishing a French best seller entitled L’effroyable imposteur (English title: The Big Lie). The book claimed that the 9-11 attacks were directed by right-wingers in the U.S. government and the military industrial complex, who were seeking justification for military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. Meyssan’s 2005 article on the Albert Einstein Institutes enumerates a long list of collaborations between Sharp and opposition groups receiving covert US support in campaigns to bring down Asian and Eastern European governments unfriendly to US interests.
Iran and Venezuela’s Denunciation of Sharp
The article was widely reposted on leftist and libertarian websites. In 2008, it resulted in a formal denunciation of Sharp by the Iranian government and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, both targets of AEI destabilization activities. In June 2008, Stephen Zunes, chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Peter Ackerman’s International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) issued a rebuttal, Sharp Attack Unwarranted, in Foreign Policy in Focus. The latter is an on-line magazine of the Institute for Policy Studies, where Zunes serves as Middle East Editor. The article was simultaneously reprinted in the Huffington Post.
Zunes subsequently persuaded Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Code Pink and other high profile progressives to help launch an on-line petition defending Sharp’s progressive credentials. However, as numerous critics point out, he never addressed Meyssan’s most important concerns: the military/intelligence backgrounds of many of the Albert Einstein Institution’s (AEI’s) directors and advisory board members; their documented collaboration, together with Sharp, with opposition groups responsible for the “color” revolutions in Eastern Europe; and their work with Venezuelan opposition groups in an effort to topple president Hugo Chavez.
AEI ties to Department of State and Military-Intelligence Complex
Australian researcher Michael Barker, Canadian activist Stephen Gowans and CIA watchers wrote detailed critiques defending Meyssan’s 2005 expose. Barker’s rebuttal is entitled Sharp Reflection Warranted. Barker’s main argument is that the problem of elite manipulation of ostensibly progressive groups isn’t at all new. He also points readers to excellent links regarding collaboration between the CIA and the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and others.
Gowans argues that Zunes, a paid adviser to the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), is hardly a neutral or objective party, given his involvement with Peter Ackerman and the ICNC. Ackerman, hardly the progressive peace activist, is a Wall Street investment banker, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and head of Freedom House. The latter, according to Noam Chomsky (in Manufacturing Consent), is “interlocked” with the CIA and a “virtual propaganda arm of the (US) government and international right wing.” According to Louis Proyect, Ackerman is also on the advisory board of the ultraconservative Cato Institute’s Project on Social Security Choice. Not surprisingly, this group strongly advocates for privatizing Social Security.
A Close Look At Sharp’s Past
There is no question that Thierry Meyssan’s 2005 article on Gene Sharp’s extensive links to the US military-intelligence complex is one of the most important exposes of the 21st century. Its only weaknesses is Meyssan’s failure to cite many of his references. What follows is the best publicly verifiable chronology of Sharp’s life I could come up with (most comes from Meyssan’s 2005 article with sources added):
1953 – conscientious objector during Korean War, imprisoned for nine months for refusing to report for alternative duty. Imprisoned for refusing to fight in Korean War (People and The Progressive).
1973 – publishes The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973) with an introduction by Thomas C. Shelling. Shelling was a well known economist and professor of foreign affairs, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control. After working with US ambassador Averel Harriman in Paris in 1948 to implement the Marshall Plan, Shelling had a fifty year affiliation with the Rand Corporation (US military think tank) and is widely credited as the theoretician behind military escalation in Vietnam.
1983 – founds the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) in Boston, with the assistance of Major General Edward B Atkeson, who was on the first AEI advisory board. The AEI website identifies Atkeson as Senior Fellow at the Institute of Land Warfare Association of the US Army. According to the CIA website, during the 1980s Atkeson was also a National Intelligence Officer for General Purpose Forces.
1985 – publishes a book entitled Making Europe Unconquerable: the Potential of Civilian-base Deterrence and Defense. The second edition includes a preface by George Kennan, historian and State Department senior diplomat whose writings influenced Truman in the creation of the Truman Doctrine. Kennan is viewed as the father of the US foreign policy of “containment” (by force) of Soviet expansion.
1986, 1988 and 1989 – travels to Israel/Palestine to bolster support for the Palestinian Center for the History of Non-Violence, founded in 1983 by one of Sharp’s disciple. It’s a matter of public record that Sharp met with Colonel Reuvan Gal, who directed the Israel Defense Force (IDF) Psychological Action Division. Meyssan claims the two conspired to create a split in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) by creating a dissident “nonviolent” group. Gal and Sharp claim the purpose of their meetings were to devise ways to dissuade IDF commanders from using tanks and excessive military force against Palestinian settlers (see The Jeruselem Fund, Mubarak Awad, and Nonviolence).
1987 – receives funding from the US Institute of Peace to host seminars instructing US allies on defense based on civil disobedience. By law, the US Institute of Peace integrates elements of US intelligence.
1989 – assists Colonel Robert Helvey in training anticommunist Burmese opposition groups concerned about the growing strength of the Burmese Communist Party. The AEI website refers to Helvey as a retired US military officer and ex-military attaché in Burma. He was actually a thirty year veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency with extensive experience in overseeing clandestine and subversive operations in Southeast Asia (see Guerrillas Without Guns Col Helvey Weaponizing Nonviolence and Peace Magazine Archive). Following his retirement from the Defense Intelligence Agency, Helvey has been board member and president of the Albert Einstein Institution.
1990 – with his AEI team (according to AEI website), assists Lithuanian opposition leaders in organizing popular resistance against the Red Army. According to the website, the AEI also did trainings with anticommunist opposition groups in Tibet, Estonia, and Belarus.
1998 – travels, with Helvey, to Eastern Europe to train Otpor, a group of Serbian youth opposed to Slobodan Milosevic and Europe’s last communist government. Milosevic was immensely popular with Serbian people for standing up to NATO and for his generous social policies. The trainings were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). (See 2000 New York Times interview with NED officer Paul B. McCarthy).
2004 – Helvey and other AEI members meet with the Ukrainian resistance in Kiev (see Mowat’s Coup d’État in Disguise).
2003-2004 – travels, with Helvey and other AEI team members to Venezuela to meet with wealthy Venezuelan opposition leaders, following the failed 2002 CIA-sponsored coup against Chavez. The AEI advises them in organizing a recall referendum against Chavez. They also train the leaders of Súmate during the August 2004 demonstrations and assist in the formulation of “Operation Guarimba”, a series of often-violent street blockades that result in several deaths. According to an analysis published by Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor), Venezuelan student leaders traveled to Belgrade in 2005 to meet with representatives of AEI-trained OTPOR/CANVAS, before traveling to Boston to consult directly with Sharp himself.
Fast Forward to the “Arab Spring”
In the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) seem to have handed the baton to his disciple Peter Ackerman. It was Ackerman who conducted nonviolence trainings in Cairo and Tunisia in 2009-2010 (see Foreign Policy Journal and New York Times).
As others have documented elsewhere, the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa were neither spontaneous nor indigenous. Many of the individuals and groups who helped organize them received training (in the US) sponsored by the State Department and CIA-linked democracy manipulating foundations (see Tony Cartalucci’s Soros Celebrates the Fall of Tunisia). The New York Times lends further credibility to these claims in their April 2011 U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings.
***
About the author: Dr Bramhall is an American child and adolescent psychiatrist and political refugee in New Zealand. She has just published a free non-fiction ebook 21st Century Revolution, which can be downloaded at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/120942. Her first book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee describes the circumstances that led her to leave the US in 2002. Her website is at:
CIA methods of discrediting excellent work such as Dr Bramhall’s above article includes [but is not limited to] leaning hard on the better known progressive sites [alternet killed Dr Bramhalls’ article, probably faced with funding threats] not to run the pieces while providing other so-called ‘alternative’ news sites where the articles CAN be run but subjected to guilt by association and other method of discrediting the information. For instance ‘Daily Censored’ picked up and ran this article but concurrently ran an article supporting David Icke’s ‘lizard DNA’ theories [to associate Dr Bramhall’s work with nut jobs.] It then becomes the dilemma of the author whether to publish in less than optimal circumstance or not get the information a wider audience (beyond one’s personal blog.)
Since Dr Bramhalls’ article had been originally published, the classic ‘color revolution’ model based on U.S, Department of State (Siamese twin to CIA) or ‘the Sharp method’ had been employed (again) in Ukraine.
Other method of disinformation is noted in regards to alternative media’s Robert Parry has misreported events in Ukraine (myself not being the only one to notice), effectively pointing away from actions reflecting the role of ‘covert operations’ intelligence. Now, it can’t hurt (truth) to demonstrate the consequence of Gene Sharp suborning Ghandi’s model to utilitarian ‘Realpolitic’ sans morality. What Robert Parry (and his associate Ray McGovern) inexcusably fail to report in relation to Ukraine is, not only did Department of State/CIA aligned NGO’s organize and train the Maidan protesters based on Gene Sharp’s nonviolence model; the CIA operations sector subsequently organized the deaths of the same when they trained and imported the snipers who murdered them. A conservative Polish Member of European Parliament, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, states in an interview the Maidan snipers were trained in Poland in a joint operation with USA intelligence services:
Question: “[you are] a supporter of the thesis it was a CIA operation?”
Answer: “Maidan was also our operation. The snipers were trained in Poland”
The original interview transcript in Polish language HERE
A reasonable English language summary of the interview by PRAVDA:
An earlier leaked phone call between the European Union’s Cathrine Ashton and the Estonian foreign minister, indicate it was people aligned with the new USA supported Ukrainian administration were behind the snipers who killed both protestors and police during confrontation in Kiev.
Robert Parry points solely to out of control ultra-nationalists behind the snipers. A better explanation (backing up both the Polish MEP and leaked conversation) is found in rogue CIA officer Phillip Agee’s expose: ‘Terrorism and Civil Society‘
Furthermore, Robert Parry has misreported the facts on MH 17, detracting from intelligence operations in effort shifting responsibility, as well has pushed blatant American constitutional history revisions. With Ray McGovern’s former military intelligence and CIA background in close association with Robert Parry’s reporting, it is more than fair to question to what extent the American non-violence movement has been penetrated for purpose of information operation manipulations away from discovering the actual facts of the USA’s geopolitical dirty work.
The New Yorker magazine’s “regular columnist” Seymour Hersh had defected to the The London Review of Books in recent times, in matters of the national security state, apparently because the New Yorker had not been publishing Hersh’s more dangerous or damning materials. There is a full two years gap, March 2013 to March 2015, the New Yorker had not published anything by Hersh at all and those two pieces are mostly more or less ‘harmless’ (to the national security state) materials of either a retrospective or philosophical bent. It had been April 2012 since Hersh’s “Our Men in Iran” had last poked a stick in the American intelligence community’s eye at the New Yorker. Fortunately (or in some cases, perhaps not so fortunately) Hersh found a new platform for his articles.
Now, if I were Seymour Hersh’s ‘national security’ professor at his local community college over the semester and a half since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 (counting semesters in geopolitical decades), now is about the time I would call Hersh into my office and let him know he is in serious danger of flunking the academic year:
One incomplete end of 1st semester assignment he stated he’d be turning in, and has not, on Dick Cheney’s “executive assassination ring”, promised in April, 2009 but still ‘under construction’ a full six years later.
Insofar as the current semester:
January 2011, Class presentation ‘speech at Doha‘ (Qatar) graded B- … Hersh quite accurately describes the Joint Special Operations Command as “Crusaders” with the mission statement equivalent to “‘we’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals'” … however his reduced grade stems from the fact it’s not just the JSOC but the larger command structure at the Pentagon per se. If this crusading element were limited more or less to JSOC (where there is indeed a severe infection) and not the larger Pentagon command structure, e.g. we would have seen the USA military’s number one uber-right evangelical/proselytizing cult, the Air Force Academy, cleaned up. Instead, what we see is a sustained pretense of dealing with the hard core evangelical elements in the USAF officer corps where a necrotic fundamentalism is the demanded, de facto norm, throughout the institution. We’ll come back to this infection.
April 2012, Our Men in Iran; paper graded C+ … excellent beginning work on the Iranian dissident group Mojahedin-e-Khalq having been trained by the Americans on behalf of the Israelis to carry out assassinations in Iran. Reduced grade for overlooking the USA had blackmailed the Mojahedin-e-Khalq into returning to the business of terror (after they’d renounced armed struggle) by holding a large portion of the rank and file membership hostage; initially at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, and subsequently at what amounts to a prison annex at the Baghdad airport. These are a few thousand MeK veteran troops have been imprisoned in Iraq, under threat of being handed over to Iran, since surrendering to the Americans, without hostilities, at the outset of the Iraq invasion. Other MeK dissidents are scattered across Europe, where they operate as an Iranian ‘human rights’ front in Berlin, as well large numbers are in Paris where the leadership enjoys a decadent luxury and the ‘friendship’ of some notable American neocons, not least Rudy Giuliani. Meanwhile, the MeK ‘de-listing’ as a terror group by the USA’s Department of State appears to coincide with MeK re-entering the terror game, under duress, on the side of American and Israeli interests, in a cynicism that is typical of western geopolitical realities.
December 2013 is Hersh’s ‘whose sarin‘ initial outline of doubts Assad’s government is the perpetrator of the ongoing chemical weapons attacks in Syria. We’ll consider this a beginning syllabus on the subject Hersh returns to in the next piece. No grade.
April 2014, with The Red Line and The Rat Line Hersh takes the ball forward on the case for sarin gas employ in Syria in what the spooks call a false flag, in this case Turkey’s MIT or external intelligence has facilitated the delivery of all the necessary components to assemble sarin to al-Nusra (al-Qaida) in Syria. His article, if somewhat incomplete with the details, does nail the real perpetrators. Considering his sources are American, and he actually managed to get into the facts, we have to give him a solid B … the reduced grade reflects either 1) USA intelligence is handicapped in the matter (not likely) or 2) Hersh or his sources are hedging, which is more likely the case. In fact, USA intelligence almost certainly knew it was Turkey behind the gas blamed on Assad by the time of Hersh writing his ‘syllabus’ four months previous to this and either they or Hersh held that card until comfortable with its release. Why the hedge? This professor smells a rat we’ll come back to. Hersh should have smelled it too.
May 2015, Hersh pens The Killing of Osama bin Ladin, a piece detailing too many lies, turnabouts and misleads to count within the American ‘security apparatus’ on the supposed death of a man already dead a full 13 years by the time of the Hersh narrative. Second semester mid-term exam F for EPIC FAIL. Central Intelligence had last met with their long time asset bin Ladin in July of 2001 at the American Hospital in Dubai where he was being treated for renal failure and a diagnosis of two years to live, maximum. Imagine, just three months later, a frail ‘two years to live’ bin-Ladin puts his portable dialysis machine on mules, together with a portable electric grid or generator, diesel or petrol, and goes to live in a cave in the Hindu Kush. Spare parts for all the machines and backup generator included. On top of having escaped Kandahar with the USA invasion of October, this ‘mule train’ (or whatever substituted for travel over terrain that denied motorized vehicle use, I doubt they were using Uzbek ‘coolies’ to haul generators, dialysis machine and fuel) traveled to Tora Bora which immediate vicinity was subsequently bombed to shards by B-52 heavy bombers raining down ordinance to a point “the landscape has been changed” or enough carpet bombing to level a small city. Now, having to escape THAT, bin-Ladin’s ‘mule train’ consisted of (imagine the tune ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’)
12 Uzbek-Qaida muleskinners
11 mules with shoes a-sparkin
10 Jerrycans a-clanging
9 B-40 rockets a-swingin
80 MmmRrrrEees…
7 cases of 7.62 x 39 mm
6 cell phones with no signal
50 TaleeeBan…
4 ISI agents
3 Pashtun guides
2 generators
and a dialysis machine with spare parts.
Supposedly having left Tora Bora unnoticed, bin-Ladin was never heard from again by SIGNIT (signals intelligence, Tora Bora radio intercepts were his last.) The man was dead. He never made it to Pakistan. However he was still useful as a boogeyman because no one could produce his body and the CIA morons on location presumed bin-Ladin escaped (no doubt with his mule train) rather than admit they didn’t (and don’t to this day) know what actually happened. Bonered up CIA cowboy Gary Berntsen (hiya Gary, how tricks since I buggered your ass at San Feliu de Guixols, 2010? FYI what I did to you is called a ‘dry cob’ job) and CIA moron Cofer Black decided to pin their onerous (odious, actually) failure on the military, and Alfreda Bikowsky, who actually sent the FBI to search for Black al-Qaida cells in Montana (what a story that is), was subsequently put in charge of looking for a dead man.
The most likely consequent scenario is, nearly nine years later it was becoming increasingly clear to the Pakistani ISI that in fact bin-Ladin never survived December-January 2001-2002 and the legend has to be finished off. With an axe to grind with the CIA (the botched Khan nuclear black market sting), they set up a ‘dangle’ (a former ISI officer walks in to bag the $25 million reward) for the CIA which rushes to take the bait. What to do when the raid on the Abbottabad kills several harmless people and at best nets a bin-Ladin look-alike? No photo release and bury him at sea without any ships crew witnessed this and all military records seem to be ‘lost?’ Then SEAL Team Six in the hands of some of the best combat aviator coordinators in the world has a totally unprofessional- incompetent demise and we are assured by the DoD this was not the unit involved in the bin-Ladin ‘body snatch’ (we’re supposed to take the DoD’s word for it.) The Abbottabad bin-Ladin relatives are subsequently held incommunicado (no press interviews) by the Pakistanis and simply vanish, supposedly sent off to live happily ever after in some nirvana-like life courtesy of the House of Saud. Sure, that ought to work. Especially when considering the absolute morons running the CIA throughout this period would be perfect to set up for an inter-intelligence-agency sting. Shit happens.
So, what to do when ‘the prez’ has announced to the world that bin-Ladin has been killed before the DNA samples tested negative? Tell him? Probably not. Classify everything ‘lost’ (that’s what the Department of Defense did) and likely put a counterfeit DNA result into whatever report was necessary over at CIA and then bury it in classification at the highest level (with the ‘original samples ‘lost’ or destroyed, no doubt.) The numerous lies and conflicting stories Seymour Hersh turns up in his ‘The Killing of Osama bin Ladin’ make more sense when looked at in the circumstance of an agency (the CIA) which had been ‘snookered’ and no one knew what story to tell because no one wanted to take on the responsibility of getting all the complicit idiots (liars) on the same page in a situation of no competence. The circumstance precluded creating a consistent mythology. But this is not the case with Hersh’s next avowed set of facts:
December 2015 (the January 2016 issue of the London Review of Books) Hersh’s Military to Military sets out a case for the Pentagon flirting with treason (Hersh does not call it that) with undermining Commander-in-Chief Obama’s objectives in Syria. Hersh’s ‘rendition’ of the facts, in short, is the Pentagon has indirectly propped up Assad with intelligence sharing through the Russian military, so as to prevent the collapse of Syria into the chaos that typifies today’s Libya, only worse. The White House didn’t know this, or if they did, they didn’t know what to do about it except to nominate a hard core right wing Catholic and perfect Russophobe-cold-war-dick named Joe Dunford to take over as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and get the loose-cannon generals back under the control of moroness policy advisers like Sam Power and her reptilian reflex approach of ‘if we can fuck it, it will be fucked.’ Hersh’s narrative presents the following, coherent seeming mythology:
Our Generals under recently retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Dempsey, come across as sensible, sane and motivated to the common good in this endeavor.
The White House, by contrast, comes across as senseless, trapped in their incompetence, even insane, or a perfect world peace threatening ‘cluster-fuck’ in the mean vernacular.
Hersh closes his piece with entertaining a mystery; why is it insisted on by the Obama White House we will follow the path of least resistance to absolute world chaos? Or in Hersh’s own words:
The Joint Chiefs and the DIA were constantly telling Washington’s leadership of the jihadist threat in Syria … [t]he message was never listened to. Why not?
The tongue-in-cheek answer would be everyone at the White House is infected with David Icke’s lizard DNA. But not so fast, because I have the real intelligence on the Pentagon and our generals aren’t some crew of goody-two-shoes boy scouts. These guys are real reptiles (a metaphor, let’s not be too friendly with the theology of David Icke) with the ethical motivations of a monitor lizard. This brings us back (as promised) to Hersh’s feeble understanding of the religious right in our military’s officer corps at the very top. General Dempsey, the focus of sanity in Hersh’s presentation, has been little more than an alter boy to the Opus Dei Hersh accuses of hijacking the JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] in his Doha speech, a dyed in the wool, conservative Catholic through and through. Let’s have a look at where the recently retired [former] chairman Dempsy has landed:
American Grand Strategy (AGS) is an interdisciplinary initiative across Duke University that creates and shares new knowledge in the grand strategy field. The program’s mission is to prepare the next generation of strategists by studying past generations and interacting with current strategic leaders. We are building a research community of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates who are committed to deepening their understanding of America’s role in the world – past, present and future.
AGS hosts The Ambassador Dave and Kay Phillips Family International Lecture series: endowed for the purpose of bringing prominent figures in international security, foreign policy, and diplomacy to Duke University in order to engage with students, faculty, and the larger Duke community about issues of international importance. Contemporary leaders who have attended include, Mitt Romney, Stephen Hadley, Ray Odierno, Karl Eikenberry, David Petraeus, Karl Rove, Howard Dean, Condoleezza Rice, Martin Dempsey, Robert Gates, and Fareed Zakaria
If ever there were a snake-pit of ruinous geopolitical policy-makers and pundits (liars for Jesus) on the right wing of American politics, that’s it. This is Seymour Hersh’s protagonist Dempsey in his real colors. Of the no less than four generals and one Secretary of Defense listed; Odierno, Eikenberry, Petraeus, Dempsey and Gates respectively, all were in position to influence and reduce the radical Christian right’s pervasive influence in the USA’s armed forces. None of them did. Eikenberry and Odierno firmly sat on their hands. Dempsey protected them. Petraeus endorsed them. Gates promoted them and what’s more is, was key in setting the Obama administration down the wrong road at its inception when working with Petraeus to more closely integrate the JSOC to the CIA (not to mention instigating the failed Afghanistan ‘surge.’) Of the non-military personalities, Condoleezza Rice is a rabid right wing evangelical. Her deputy, Hadley, had his fingerprints all over the Bush Jr crimes sprees including the frame-up of Saddam for possession of uranium (Plame affair.) Rove devised the strategy which handed the USA, lock, stock & barrel, to the American religious right. Dean is complicit in providing cover for the Mojahedin-e-Khalq terror de-listing even as that group was blackmailed into reentering the game versus Iran but now on the side of Israel with USA supported assassination training, that very training being the subject of Hersh’s ‘Our Men in Iran.’ Zakaria comes up a CIA media whore for geopolitics in nearly every direction one looks, not least his FORD Foundation funding for past projects. Every one of those listed at the Duke program is a snake dripping venom on the right wing of politics, including stealth neocon Dean, who worked together with Rudy Giuliani and Tom Ridge, when ‘rehabilitating’ Mojahedin-e-Khalq for Bibi Netanyahu’s outsourced assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Now, looking at Dempsey in that cesspool when compared with the sanity assigned by Hersh in his ‘Military to Military’, Hersh’s portrayal of Dempsey can’t hold up.
Then, we have another problem. Why would Hersh’s sympathetic sources rat out the supposedly sane generals trying to keep the insanity from spiraling out of control in Syria? That doesn’t smell right. Not only does it not smell right, it violates his sources intelligence training. All military sources would have the necessary intelligence training to operate at the level Hersh is reporting the leaks from and the discipline not to compromise themselves and associates. Are Hersh’s essential facts on intelligence sharing with Assad through the Russians properly lined up? Probably. So, what’s up? Why the leaks to Hersh?
Behind the Mythology
I’ve seen some of the confidential statements to Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation by the few of our secular General Officers pointing to the rampant treason against our constitution by Christian dominion personalities they dare not speak about or challenge openly. If our secular Generals and Admirals don’t dare speak out, what should that say to a reasonable person? Who controls the tactical nuclear weapons that are held independently of the President’s ‘football’ controlling a strategic nuclear launch? Personalities like NATO Supreme Commander (US Air Force General) Phillip Breedlove who is clearly itching for a war with Russia. It would appear he just got an (Obama appointed) ally in Joe Dunford who has replaced Hersh’s faux hero (snake in the grass) General Dempsey as JCS chairman.
Whoever ratted out the Russian connection to Hersh has an agenda and that agenda is not preserving the sanity (probably accurately) portrayed by Hersh. What we are more likely looking at is, the struggle between the Christian dominion and secular officers, the elephant in the living room no one dares bring up. The radical right wing had got wind of what is up and pulled a bait and switch on the reading public by a duped Seymour Hersh who was used as the ‘cut out’ to 1) collapse the secular officers intelligence sharing scheme 2) take credit in the public eye for sanity by those very same insane officers and most importantly 3) undercut Hillary on whose watch the badly fucked up Syria policy was set in motion. What an irony, because Hillary would so deserve this and double rich in irony as it was then CIA director & rabid right wing evangelical David Petraeus did the dirty work initiating the hit job on the Assad regime.
Don’t worry about this all not making much common sense, if Obama’s ‘national security’ squeeze Susan Rice never saw a ‘humanitarian intervention’ she didn’t like, the religious right generals at the Pentagon will take every one of them gratefully; all the while ‘praising Jesus’ on the road to Armageddon and pointing the finger of blame at people who’re just plain stupid and have been played to precisely the generals agenda of seeing the return of Jesus via apocalyptic events in the middle east per their theology and ‘Bible Prophecy’ … while Obama’s ‘girls’ … Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and Susan Rice get the full credit for taking us all to hell in a hand-basket when in fact they only deserve the one half of it. Meanwhile you can take in your Pentagon Bible study HERE
Now, on the overdue paper from last semester, if Hersh’s study of Cheney tracks down the Kosovo criminal ring that harvested Cheney’s replacement heart for his transplant, I’ll pass Hersh for the academic year with a solid C grade 😉
I don’t know who are the strategists for the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity but I’ll say this about their ‘open letter’ (pasted in, below) demanding USA Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lay out the facts concerning the Ghouta, Syria, sarin gas attack:
Asking Kerry to come clean on Ghouta is like appealing to Foghorn Leghorn to properly identify a chicken. Asking Lavrov to confront the Obama administration with the facts is demanding his boss, President Putin, surrender applying ‘realpolitik’ in his dealings with the USA which seems nearly as unlikely. Why not hit home with the evidence (it’s out there) at German parliament, the office of the German federal prosecutor and office of the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court with an online writing campaign? The German political establishment is sensitive to the issue of gassing people, the German people are not (yet) entirely a flock trained to stay within the electric fence of the official positions set out by their leadership and German intelligence has been demonstrably complicit in the attempted overthrow of Assad.
Open letters are a joke. What is needed is a deluge of letters demanding accountability; effectively hammering at either there is a rule of law or there is not a rule of law, while putting what are supposed to be accountable institutions on the spot:
If ‘Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity’ would get behind the (above linked) letter campaign or do something similar themselves, they’d quit looking like the current edition of ‘Meet the Fockers‘
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MEMORANDUM FOR: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and Foreign Minister of Russia Sergey Lavrov
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Sarin Attack at Ghouta on Aug. 21, 2013
In a Memorandum of Oct. 1, 2013, we asked each of you to make public the intelligence upon which you based your differing conclusions on who was responsible for the sarin chemical attack at Ghouta, outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. On Dec. 10, 2015, Eren Erdem, a member of parliament in Turkey, citing official documents, blamed Turkey for facilitating the delivery of sarin to rebels in Syria.
Mr. Kerry, you had blamed the Syrian government. Mr. Lavrov, you had described the sarin as “homemade” and suggested anti-government rebels were responsible. Each of you claimed to have persuasive evidence to support your conclusion.
Neither of you responded directly to our appeal to make such evidence available to the public, although, Mr. Lavrov, you came close to doing so. In a speech at the UN on Sept. 26, 2013, you made reference to the views we presented in our VIPS Memorandum, Is Syria a Trap?, sent to President Obama three weeks earlier.
Pointing to strong doubt among chemical weapons experts regarding the evidence adduced to blame the government of Syria for the sarin attack, you also referred to the “open letter sent to President Obama by former operatives of the CIA and the Pentagon,” in which we expressed similar doubt.
Mr. Kerry, on Aug. 30, 2013, you blamed the Syrian government, publicly and repeatedly, for the sarin attack. But you failed to produce the kind of “Intelligence Assessment” customarily used to back up such claims.
We believe that this odd lack of a formal “Intelligence Assessment” is explained by the fact that our former colleagues did not believe the evidence justified your charges and that, accordingly, they resisted pressure to “fix the intelligence around the policy,” as was done to “justify” the attack on Iraq.
Intelligence analysts were telling us privately (and we told the President in our Memorandum of Sept. 6, 2013) that, contrary to what you claimed, “the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was not responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21.”
This principled dissent from these analysts apparently led the White House to create a new art form, a “Government Assessment,” to convey claims that the government in Damascus was behind the sarin attack. It was equally odd that the newly minted genre of report offered not one item of verifiable evidence.
(We note that you used this new art form “Government (not Intelligence) Assessment” a second time – again apparently to circumvent intelligence analysts’ objections. On July 22, 2014, just five days after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, after the media asked you to come up with evidence supporting the charges you leveled against “pro-Russian separatists” on the July 20 Sunday talk shows, you came up with the second, of only two, “Government Assessment.” Like the one on the chemical attack in Syria, the assessment provided meager fare when it comes to verifiable evidence.)
Claims and Counterclaims
Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2013, President Obama asserted: “It’s an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the [Syrian] regime carried out this attack [at Ghouta].”
Mr. Lavrov, that same day you publicly complained that U.S. officials kept claiming “’the Syrian regime,’ as they call it, is guilty of the use of chemical weapons, without providing comprehensive proof.” Two days later you told the U.N. General Assembly you had given Mr. Kerry “the latest compilation of evidence, which was an analysis of publicly available information.” You also told the Washington Post, “This evidence is not something revolutionary. It’s available on the Internet.”
On the Internet? Mr. Kerry, if your staff avoided calling your attention to Internet reports about Turkish complicity in the sarin attack of Aug. 21, 2013, because they lacked confirmation, we believe you can now consider them largely confirmed.
Documentary Evidence
Addressing fellow members of parliament on Dec. 10, 2015, Turkish MP Eren Erdem from the Republican People’s Party (a reasonably responsible opposition group) confronted the Turkish government on this key issue. Waving a copy of “Criminal Case Number 2013/120,” Erdem referred to official reports and electronic evidence documenting a smuggling operation with Turkish government complicity.
In an interview with RT four days later, Erdem said Turkish authorities had acquired evidence of sarin gas shipments to anti-government rebels in Syria, and did nothing to stop them.
The General Prosecutor in the Turkish city of Adana opened a criminal case, and an indictment stated “chemical weapons components” from Europe “were to be seamlessly shipped via a designated route through Turkey to militant labs in Syria.” Erdem cited evidence implicating the Turkish Minister of Justice and the Turkish Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation in the smuggling of sarin.
The Operation
According to Erdem, the 13 suspects arrested in raids carried out against the plotters were released just a week after they were indicted, and the case was closed — shut down by higher authority. Erdem told RT that the sarin attack at Ghouta took place shortly after the criminal case was closed and that the attack probably was carried out by jihadists with sarin gas smuggled through Turkey.
Small wonder President Erdogan has accused Erdem of “treason.” It was not Erdem’s first “offense.” Earlier, he exposed corruption by Erdogan family members, for which a government newspaper branded him an “American puppet, Israeli agent, a supporter of the terrorist PKK and the instigator of a coup.”
In our Sept. 6, 2013 Memorandum for the President, we reported that coordination meetings had taken place just weeks before the sarin attack at a Turkish military garrison in Antakya – just 15 miles from the Syrian border with Syria and 55 miles from its largest city, Aleppo.
In Antakya, senior Turkish, Qatari and U.S. intelligence officials were said to be coordinating plans with Western-sponsored rebels, who were told to expect an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development.” This, in turn, would lead to a U.S.-led bombing of Syria, and rebel commanders were ordered to prepare their forces quickly to exploit the bombing, march into Damascus, and remove the Assad government.
A year before, the New York Times reported that the Antakya area had become a “magnet for foreign jihadis, who are flocking into Turkey to fight holy war in Syria.” The Times quoted a Syrian opposition member based in Antakya, saying the Turkish police were patrolling this border area “with their eyes closed.”
And, Mr. Lavrov, while the account given by Eren Erdem before the Turkish Parliament puts his charges on the official record, a simple Google search including “Antakya” shows that you were correct in stating the Internet contains a wealth of contemporaneous detail supporting Erdem’s disclosures.
Mr. Kerry, while in Moscow on Dec. 15, you said to a Russian interviewer that Syrian President Assad “has gassed his people – I mean, gas hasn’t been used in warfare formally for years – for – and gas is outlawed, but Assad used it.”
Three days later The Washington Post dutifully repeated the charge about Assad’s supposed killing “his own people with chemical weapons.” U.S. media have made this the conventional wisdom. The American people are not fully informed. There has been no mainstream media reporting on Turkish MP Erdem’s disclosures.
Renewed Appeal
We ask you again, Secretary Kerry and Foreign Minister Lavrov, to set the record straight on this important issue. The two of you have demonstrated an ability to work together on important matters – the Iran nuclear deal, for example – and have acknowledged a shared interest in defeating ISIS, which clearly is not Turkish President Erdogan’s highest priority. Indeed, his aims are at cross-purposes to those wishing to tamp down the violence in Syria.
After the shoot-down of Russia’s bomber on Nov. 24, President Vladimir Putin put Russian forces in position to retaliate the next time, and told top defense officials, “Any targets threatening our [military] group or land infrastructure must be immediately destroyed.” We believe that warning should be taken seriously. What matters, though, is what Erdogan believes.
There is a good chance Erdogan will be dismissive of Putin’s warning, as long as the Turkish president believes he can depend on NATO always to react in the supportive way it did after the shoot-down.
One concrete way to disabuse him of the notion that he has carte blanche to create incidents that could put not only Turkey, but also the U.S., on the verge of armed conflict with Russia, would be for the U.S. Secretary of State and the Russian Foreign Minister to coordinate a statement on what we believe was a classic false-flag chemical attack on Aug. 21, 2013, facilitated by the Turks and aimed at mousetrapping President Obama into a major attack on Syria.
One of our colleagues, a seasoned analyst of Turkish affairs, put it this way: “Erdogan is even more dangerous if he thinks that he now has NATO license to bait Russia — as he did with the shoot-down. I don’t think NATO is willing to give him that broader license, but he is a loose cannon.”
FOR THE STEERING GROUP, VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Larry Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer
Edward Loomis, NSA, Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.)
Scott Ritter, former Maj., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Robert David Steele, former CIA Operations Officer
Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned)
This article briefly examines the close resemblance of ‘The Secret Team’ to the Doug Coe “Family” Christian millennial cult, sponsors of the USA’s ‘National Prayer Breakfast.’ We begin with a look at ‘The Secret Team.’
Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty was one of the top Pentagon liaison officers for CIA special operations during the Vietnam war era. A highly ethical and intelligent man, Prouty more than came to have grave doubts about the endeavors he was involved in. He studied what was happening in his line of work closely and subsequently revealed what he had seen. He was, and is, no doubt the most important whistle-blower of the post World War Two era; arguably his revelations have been the most suppressed of any whistle-blower.
Here, I have taken a few key paragraphs from his seminal work, ‘The Secret Team’, to demonstrate what he had written about is as relevant today as when written nearly 45 years ago.
Prouty’s paragraphs are in italics, my clarifications and other observations are NOT in italics and are bracketed [ ]
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It was the CIA, with help from a few other agencies, that put together the Inter-American Police Academy during the early Kennedy years, which played such an important part in emphasizing national police power in the nations of Latin America. The CIA brought in police instructors from all over the United States and from the military for this school. The success of this school, operating covertly from an Army base in the Canal of Panama, led to other schools in the United States that have carried on this type of work for police forces in this country. Part of the impetus behind the great buildup in the strength of police force all over the country dates back to this CIA police academy work and to the other schools it spawned. This police work not only involved training but it integrated new weapons, new procedures, and new techniques into American police work, some of which has been good and much of which has been quite ominous.
Anyone who doubts that this nation building and police activity has not become real and very effective right here in the United States need only visit the area around Fort Bragg to find one of these early paramilitary CIA-oriented specialists, General Tolson, sending his American soldiers out into the countryside with nation-building programs for the citizens of the United States. If such tactics continue, it is possible that an enlargement of such a program could lead to a pacification program of areas of the United States, such as the CIA and the U.S. Army have carried out in Indochina
*
By the end of 1962 this nation had gone so far down the line following the Agency, the new Special Forces doctrine, the MAP [Military Assistance Plan, for civilian government], and the new U.S. philosophy as outlined in the President’s Committee report, that it was saying openly it was well on its way to carrying out as top national policy a major clandestine operation so big in fact that the entire government would be involved. Obviously, it could not be really clandestine in the sense that it would be kept secret from our enemies; on the contrary, it was a new kind of “clandestine”, so it would be kept secret from all Americans
*
The important thing to understand is that the [Pentagon’s] much-heralded office of SACSA [Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities] had very few military responsibilities. It was almost entirely CIA oriented. Most of its dealings with the services were in areas in which the CIA was most active. For example, the great proportion of its dealing with the Army was strictly limited to Special Forces activity. With the Air Force it was for the most part limited to Special Air Warfare activity, and with the Navy it was active in the Sea, Air, Land (SEAL) teams. There were other duties of course; but most of them gave the office something it could say it was doing while it performed its primary task of supporting the CIA, the ST [Secret Team], and of breathing life into the massive Frankenstein called counterinsurgency
*
All the pieces were coming together, and during this formative period a new special group was formed. This was the Special Group (of the NSC) [National Security Council], Counterinsurgency, better known as the Special Group CI, or CI. This group presided over the CIA, State and Defense Departments, and others, who hastily put together a host of counterinsurgency nations. It was a watch list, which varied from time to time as intelligence inputs rose and fell with the tides of international events. The Special Group CI list usually ran to about sixteen or seventeen countries, in the order of how deep they were along the path to insurgency and decay. It is worth noting that although the automatic target of CI was Communism, not a single “Communist” country, including Cuba, was on the list. It was characteristic of the new ST focus that the United States was to intervene in the affairs of its friends and not in the affairs of Russia’s friends or of China’s friends [this list is about 130 countries today]
*
As countries were added to the list their military aid programs were hastily escalated, and literally hundreds and sometimes thousands of American military personnel of all types descended upon them. Sometimes they arrived in uniform and sometimes in civilian disguise. They went to work immediately in support of the new political-social-economic doctrine, and before long new schools were being built — by the army; new hospitals were being built — by the army; new farming techniques were under way — by the army; irrigation and water purification projects were under way, — again by the army. Underlying all of the paramilitary and sometimes real military work was the CIA, working with the host government to weed out, to identify, and to categorize all of the subversive insurgents. In countries where the word Communism had never been applied to bandits, beggars, and rebels before, all of a sudden all opposition was given the name “Communist”. All the problems were attributed to Communists, and the counterinsurgency action was under way [in today’s world, one sees a greatly enhanced version of this phenomenon, inclusive of World Bank, IMF and related USAID programs, as well as less ‘benign’ or overtly militarized involving the western powers armed forces in circumstance where the term ‘terrorist’ supplants ‘communist’, excepting those cases where the actual terrorists are given cover, for instance the ‘moderate opposition’ in Syria because they serve a means to an end; such as the overthrow of Assad. In less overt circumstance, the example could be Ethiopia where the USA has a low key counter-insugency presence and the Ethiopian military has been forcibly relocating populations to turn fertile farming land over to World Bank associated programs where the actual beneficiaries are western corporations. These dislocated communities risk becoming radicalized and new insurgencies born. In the case of Ethiopia, the counter-insurgency program is already in place, essentially a USA funded police directorate protecting the affluent western stockholder’s bottom line. If, or more likely, when, an Ethiopian insurgency develops, because Ethiopia is a Christian nation, the insurgency will be characterized along the lines of ‘The Lord’s Resistance Army’ or Joseph Kony]
*
For all its fabrication and apparent unreality, especially in this open society, the ST machine does have a central soul or brain… or perhaps… holy spirit. It is the evidence of a form of new religion. It has its secrets. It has its divine and unquestioned rights and obligations. It has self-righteous power over life and death. It does not believe in anything. It does not value anything. It is utterly ruthless [this preceding precisely describes today’s Doug Coe “Family” cult, the sponsor of the National Prayer Breakfast, featuring a membership entirely made up of Christian ‘millennial’ personalities of which many populate the apex of American corporate boardrooms and government institutions; including numerous congressmen, senators and serving generals throughout the USA military structures. ] Its greatest motivating force and drive is entirely undefined, because it moves by pressure. It reacts. It is therefore blind, meaningless, senseless. It will do anything in the name of anti-Communism. Yet in its greatest anti-Communist war it sees no inconsistency in the killing of one of its most anti-Communist creations — Ngo Dinh Diem. In its zeal to rid the Caribbean of Communism, it leaps at the chance to rid the Dominican Republic of Latin America’s strongest non-Communist, Rafael Trujillo. Any person or groups that know how to get to this infrastructure, who have the clearances, who have the need-to-know, can make an input into this ST, and as long as the desired action is anti-Communist, the system will operate [if today you substitute ‘terrorist’ for communist, you see essentially the same behaviors and inconsistencies. Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad all kept a clampdown on al-Qaida until the the USA intervened and Islamic State was born]
The idea “The Secret Team” in fact so closely matches the Doug Coe “Family” cult, they must be identified as one and the same, is not far fetched at all:
“One needn’t be a Marxist to find fault with the Family’s mash-up of New Testament and unfettered capitalism — Adam Smith himself would have recognized that theology as a disingenuous form of self-interest by proxy. Such interests have led the Family into some strange alliances over the years. Seduced by the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s militant anti-communism, they described the murder of hundreds of thousands that brought him to power as a “spiritual revolution,” and sent delegations of congressmen and oil executives to pray to Jesus with the Muslim leader. In Africa, they anointed the Somali killer Siad Barre as God’s man and sent Sen. Grassley and a defense contractor as emissaries. Barre described himself as a “Koranic Marxist,” but he agreed to pray to Grassley’s American Christ in return for American military aid, which he then used to wreak a biblical terror on his nation. It has not yet recovered. More recently, the Family has paid for congressional Christian junkets to bastions of democracy such as Serbia, Sudan, Belarus, Albania, Macedonia and Musharraf’s Pakistan…
“Counseling Rep. Tiahrt, Doug Coe offered Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden as men whose commitment to their causes is to be emulated. Preaching on the meaning of Christ’s words, he says, “You know Jesus said ‘You got to put Him before mother-father-brother sister? Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that’s what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn’t murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom” -from investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet’s “C Street”
*
They insist they are just a group of friends, yet they funnel millions of dollars through tax-free corporations. They claim to disdain politics, but congressmen of both parties describe them as the most influential religious organization in Washington. They say they are not Christians, but simply believers.
Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is “Jesus plus nothing.” Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world -Jeff Sharlet’s “The Family”
A retrospective note would be, a certainty the Doug Coe cult (Secret Team) would have spread throughout NATO and be responsible for both: GLADIO and GLADIO B
Cut out; A mechanism or person used to create a compartment between the members of an operation to allow them to pass material or messages securely; also an agent who functions as an intermediary between a spymaster and other sub-agents.
Well, ok for lay people and beginners, but it doesn’t win a cigar with the real spooks. Let’s say the people over at NATO’s ‘deep state’ GLADIO headquarters needed to pass weapons on to a cell prepared to initiate an act of terror to justify pursuing geopolitical acts on a grand scale. The cell’s actors are bonfide Islamic State combatants, veterans of the Syria conflict, and have no idea their arms suppliers are rogue western intelligence officers. These intelligence officers would need a ‘cut out’ to pass weapons from the NATO aligned covert operations people to the ‘terrorists’ preparing to attack Paris, without the attackers or subsequent police investigators knowing the source of the guns. The weapons provided must be laundered.
Meanwhile, a Department of Defense contract employee from Academi had been providing private security in Afghanistan and decided to purchase an M92 to take with him in 2013. This short, easily concealable, modified model based on the famed Kalishnikov combat automatic rifle, is nothing short of a machine-pistol capable of (designed to) shoot a lot of people in any surprise attack at close quarters. In Afghanistan, the Academi contract employee sells his M92 to a CIA liaised Special Forces team member who desired it for an upcoming special operation run into Tajikistan. In 2014, the CIA liaised Special Forces team rotates out of Afghanistan. Their flight lands at a highly secured CIA compound within a military base in the USA. The Green Beret, without thinking, drops the M92 into the ‘recycle unauthorized/unassigned theater weapons’ bin. The M92, together with a mishmash of untraceable 1980s & 1990s AK type weapons are sent on to the CIA’s secret armory at Camp Stanley, Texas. The M92 doesn’t particularly stand out from the rest of the weapons in inventory. It looks like just another AK 47 clone with folding stock.
The following year, over in Brussels, Belgium, NATO’s rogue intelligence team GLADIO, when preparing an upcoming operation, utilize a GLADIO aligned double-agent who’s a Sephardic MOSSAD officer posing as an Arab black-market arms dealer, to arm the Adelhamid Abaaoud terror cell planning the Paris attacks. This man will be the ‘cut out.’ A CIA member of NATO Team GLADIO in Brussels has access to weapons shipped to the Syrian ‘moderate opposition’ when these shipments transit Brussels. A planeload of AK type weapons departs Camp Stanley, Texas, bound for Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, to be delivered to Hakan Fidan who’ll deliver the arms to Islamic State, a “western powers” project dedicated to the overthrow of Syria’s Basher al-Assad. The plane stops for overnight layover to refuel and change crews in Brussels. Meanwhile our NATO team GLADIO man has perused the cargo and selected several weapons of Serbian manufacture, to make it look like they originated with Europe’s Balkans wars of the 1990s, including the M92 chosen for its ease of concealment. All of the weapons are presumed to be untraceable.
Post Friday the 13th in Paris, a linked M92 machine-pistol is discovered to have been recently made in Serbia and exported to the USA*
“Milojko Brzakovic of the Zastava arms factory told The Associated Press that the M92 semi-automatic pistol’s serial number matched one his company delivered to an American online arms dealer in May 2013. It was not clear how the gun got back to Europe”
Whether you believe the preceding story is plausible or not, one thing is certain; the M92 used in the Paris attacks was very, very unlikely to have been imported to Europe by some terrorist having it mailed to him via the several parcel services delivering from the USA. It is equally unlikely the weapon transited multiple borders from USA to Islamic State in Syria to Brussels and then Paris. The more likely explanation would be something closer to the story preceding. It is actually likelier some intelligence service provided that particular weapon to the attackers in Paris and it was a snafu, because it looked similar to any number of older models and the fact it was a newer and traceable weapon is information that had been somehow been missed in the false-flag laundering process.
If I were the honest cops of Belgium and France, there would be a line of investigation opened into the known to exist NATO ‘deep state’ structures; with particular attention given to CIA and (Turkey’s) MIT operatives in Brussels, as well MOSSAD and any contacts in Paris.
Insofar as any ‘official’ American explanation or NATO related investigation that might be spawned as a result of the M92 turned up in the Paris attacks, only a naïf would trust the result.
* the original AP story has been taken down and replaced with an unconvincing explanation the weapon whose serial number turned up (according to INTERPOL) in the Paris attacks had been recovered at a crime scene in Mexico and is in the custody of the Mexican government. INTERPOL subsequently declined provide any information on how the very same weapon was identified as employed in Paris.
11 March 2016 update: Band Front-man on security absence at the Bataclan when the concert began… “it seemed “obvious” why they didn’t turn up to work”
Hello friends of social consciousness ( I presume ; )
If you would be so kind as to read the text of a linked (below) article on NATO actor Turkey involvement with chemical warfare, a news story not reported on AT ALL in western press, I would like to point you all to a world class criminal event where you could make a difference with little effort. It is as easy as copying and pasting a few addresses from the provided email list of senior members of the German parliament (plus the German constitutional court & office of the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court) into the address field of an email of your own composition or an email that copies the proposed email presented below and demand as little as two words: Do something! The rational here is, German intelligence, or their political bosses are complicit in concealing the truly culpable parties to a gas attack in Syria, a crime where the actual details have become known. It was NATO’s Turkey gassed the Syrians in what’s known in spy-craft as a ‘false flag operation.’ It is unconscionable that German intelligence (or their bosses) would fail to faithfully and honestly report on a war crime or crime against humanity where poison gas had been used.
Thank you and sincerely
Ronald Thomas West
*
Send to a few of the following (not too many, so your mail is not rejected as spam) hans-christian.stroebele@bundestag.de, ulla.jelpke@bundestag.de, irene.mihalic@bundestag.de, michael.hartmann@wk.bundestag.de, armin.schuster.wk@bundestag.de, norbert.lammert@bundestag.de, peter.hintze@bundestag.de, johannes.singhammer@bundestag.de, edelgard.bulmahn@wk.bundestag.de, ursula.schmidt@wk.bundestag.de, petra.pau@bundestag.de, claudia.roth@bundestag.de, marieluise.beck@bundestag.de, omid.nouripour@bundestag.de, stefan.liebich@bundestag.de, niels.annen@bundestag.de, roderich.kiesewetter@bundestag.de, gregor.gysi@bundestag.de, Posteingangsstelle@bgh.bund.de, OTP.InformationDesk@icc-cpi.int,
Dear Members of the German Parliament
I wish to draw attention to recent information regarding your NATO ally Turkey. It had been revealed by two courageous members of Turkey’s parliament that in fact it was Turkey’s federal intelligence services were behind the August 2013 Ghouta, Syria sarin gas attack, killing more than one thousand three hundred ordinary Syrians, an attack NATO nations had blamed on the regime of Basher al-Assad. Your own Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) intelligence agency should have been aware of this fact from very nearly the beginning, as they have been proactively engaged in Syria and the Syrian conflict, as well as spying on Turkey.
This raises strong questions of possible BND criminal complicity considering Germany’s support for certain NATO nations directly in relation to the Syrian conflict. What did the BND know and when? Has the BND, when passing intelligence on Syria to Assad’s opposition through its NATO allies, supported the actors who gassed the Syrians? Is Germany’s supportive relationship to the Erdogan government a lawful one, in light of this recent evidence? Has the BND contributed to the geopolitical disinformation blaming Assad for the August 2013 Sarin attack? Has your parliament been deceived in this matter, particularly your intelligence oversight committee?
Clearly the Sarin case, considering Germany, as a knowledgeable or complicit actor in Syria, should be pursued against the culpable officials in Turkey via the legal mechanism of Völkerstrafgesetzbuch (universal jurisdiction), as well as domestic prosecutions of those German officials, noting the BND particularly, who’ve failed in their reporting requirements and/or conspired to conceal a war crime or crime against humanity.
These should be questions and demand you will present to the federal prosecutor.
What’s more is, state actor Turkey initiating the Sarin attack is not some undocumented allegation. As you can see from the attached reporting, there was a proper investigation by Turkish authorities with developed evidence and indictments. I regret to inform you in this case, President Erdogan is personally demanding or initiating the prosecutions that have seen some 30 journalists jailed or facing jail for making these sort of revelations, as well he jails those lawful authorities who pursue investigating crimes perpetrated by the Edogan administration, undermining de jure government institutions.
Text of the (linked) competent article by reputable Turkish journalists:
Two deputies from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) have claimed that the government is against investigating Turkey’s role in sending toxic sarin gas which was used in an attack on civilians in Syria in 2013 and in which over 1,300 Syrians were killed.
CHP deputies Eren Erdem and Ali Şeker held a press conference in İstanbul on Wednesday in which they claimed the investigation into allegations regarding Turkey’s involvement in the procurement of sarin gas which was used in the chemical attack on a civil population and delivered to the terrorist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to enable the attack was derailed.
Taking the floor first, Erdem stated that the Adana Chief Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation into allegations that sarin was sent to Syria from Turkey via several businessmen. An indictment followed regarding the accusations targeting the government.
“The MKE [Turkish Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation] is also an actor that is mentioned in the investigation file. Here is the indictment. All the details about how sarin was procured in Turkey and delivered to the terrorists, along with audio recordings, are inside the file,” Erdem said while waving the file.
Erdem also noted that the prosecutor’s office conducted detailed technical surveillance and found that an al-Qaeda militant, Hayyam Kasap, acquired sarin, adding: “Wiretapped phone conversations reveal the process of procuring the gas at specific addresses as well as the process of procuring the rockets that would fire the capsules containing the toxic gas. However, despite such solid evidence there has been no arrest in the case. Thirteen individuals were arrested during the first stage of the investigation but were later released, refuting government claims that it is fighting terrorism,” Erdem noted.
Over 1,300 people were killed in the sarin gas attack in Ghouta and several other neighborhoods near the Syrian capital of Damascus, with the West quickly blaming the regime of Bashar al-Assad and Russia claiming it was a “false flag” operation aimed at making US military intervention in Syria possible.
Suburbs near Damascus were struck by rockets containing the toxic sarin gas in August 2013.
The purpose of the attack was allegedly to provoke a US military operation in Syria which would topple the Assad regime in line with the political agenda of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government.
CHP deputy Şeker spoke after Erdem, pointing out that the government misled the public on the issue by asserting that sarin was provided by Russia. The purpose was to create the perception that, according to Şeker, “Assad killed his people with sarin and that requires a US military intervention in Syria.”
He also underlined that all of the files and evidence from the investigation show a war crime was committed within the borders of the Turkish Republic.
“The investigation clearly indicates that those people who smuggled the chemicals required to procure sarin faced no difficulties, proving that Turkish intelligence was aware of their activities. While these people had to be in prison for their illegal acts, not a single person is in jail. Former prime ministers and the interior minister should be held accountable for their negligence in the incident,” Şeker further commented.
Erdem also added that he will launch a criminal complaint against those responsible, including those who issued a verdict of non-prosecution in the case, those who did not prevent the transfer of chemicals and those who first ordered the arrest of the suspects who were later released.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced in late August that an inquiry had been launched into the gas attacks allegedly perpetuated by both Assad’s Syrian regime and rebel groups fighting in Syria since the civil war erupted in 2011.
However, Erdem is not the only figure who has accused Turkey of possible involvement in the gas attack. Pulitzer Prize winner and journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, argued in an article published in 2014 that MİT was involved with extremist Syrian groups fighting against the Assad regime.
In his article, Hersh said Assad was not behind the attack, as claimed by the US and Europe, but that Turkish-Syrian opposition collaboration was trying to provoke a US intervention in Syria in order to bring down the Assad regime.
The original link is no longer good as Turkey’s government seized Today’s Zaman and shut down the English website and deleted all articles but anticipating this, the article is preserved in full HERE with screenshots.
Note on the preceding; all of the allegations concerning the proposed letter are well founded in open source. The Seymour Hersh article on the sarin gas attack: The Redline and the Ratline
Updated letter for the general public to utilize HERE
Sent to 18 senior members of German Parliament inclusive of all sitting political parties, as well the German Federal prosecutor’s office and to the office of the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court. You can use these email addresses to write parliament yourself, demanding investigation and prosecutions with a link to this post:
Mailed to: Hans Christian Stroebel <hans-christian.stroebele@bundestag.de>, ulla.jelpke@bundestag.de, irene.mihalic@bundestag.de, michael.hartmann@wk.bundestag.de, armin.schuster.wk@bundestag.de, norbert.lammert@bundestag.de, peter.hintze@bundestag.de, Johannes Singhammer <johannes.singhammer@bundestag.de>, edelgard.bulmahn@wk.bundestag.de, ursula.schmidt@wk.bundestag.de, petra.pau@bundestag.de, claudia.roth@bundestag.de, marieluise.beck@bundestag.de, omid.nouripour@bundestag.de, stefan.liebich@bundestag.de, niels.annen@bundestag.de, roderich.kiesewetter@bundestag.de, gregor.gysi@bundestag.de
I wish to draw attention to recent information regarding your NATO ally Turkey. Last month it had been revealed by two courageous members of Turkey’s parliament that in fact it was Turkey’s federal intelligence services were behind the August 2013 Sarin gas attack, killing more than one thousand ordinary Syrians, an attack NATO nations had blamed on the regime of Basher al-Assad. Your own Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) should have been aware of this fact from very nearly the beginning, as they have been proactively engaged in Syria and the Syrian conflict, as well as spying on Turkey.
What’s more is, state actor Turkey initiating the Sarin attack is not some undocumented allegation. As you can see from the attached reporting, there was a proper investigation by Turkish authorities with developed evidence and indictments. I regret to inform you in this case, President Erdogan personally initiated the prosecution that last week saw the editor of the newspaper reporting put in jail.
This raises strong questions of possible BND criminal complicity considering Germany’s support for certain NATO nations directly in relation to the Syrian conflict. What did the BND know and when? Has the BND, when passing intelligence on Syria to Assad’s opposition through its NATO allies, supported the actors who gassed the Syrians? Is Germany’s supportive relationship to the Erdogan government a lawful one, in light of this evidence? Has the BND contributed to the geopolitical disinformation blaming Assad for the August 2013 Sarin attack? Has your parliament been deceived in this matter, particularly your intelligence oversight committee?
Clearly the Sarin case, considering Germany, as a knowledgeable or complicit actor in Syria, should be pursued against the Turkey via the legal mechanism of Völkerstrafgesetzbuch, as well as domestic prosecutions of those German officials, noting the BND particularly, who’ve failed in their reporting requirements and/or conspired to conceal a war crime or crime against humanity.
These should be questions and demand you will present to the federal prosecutor.
“The history of the great events of this world are scarcely more than a history of crime” -Voltaire
*
Two deputies from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) have claimed that the government is against investigating Turkey’s role in sending toxic sarin gas which was used in an attack on civilians in Syria in 2013 and in which over 1,300 Syrians were killed.
CHP deputies Eren Erdem and Ali Şeker held a press conference in İstanbul on Wednesday in which they claimed the investigation into allegations regarding Turkey’s involvement in the procurement of sarin gas which was used in the chemical attack on a civil population and delivered to the terrorist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to enable the attack was derailed.
Taking the floor first, Erdem stated that the Adana Chief Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation into allegations that sarin was sent to Syria from Turkey via several businessmen. An indictment followed regarding the accusations targeting the government.
“The MKE [Turkish Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation] is also an actor that is mentioned in the investigation file. Here is the indictment. All the details about how sarin was procured in Turkey and delivered to the terrorists, along with audio recordings, are inside the file,” Erdem said while waving the file.
Erdem also noted that the prosecutor’s office conducted detailed technical surveillance and found that an al-Qaeda militant, Hayyam Kasap, acquired sarin, adding: “Wiretapped phone conversations reveal the process of procuring the gas at specific addresses as well as the process of procuring the rockets that would fire the capsules containing the toxic gas. However, despite such solid evidence there has been no arrest in the case. Thirteen individuals were arrested during the first stage of the investigation but were later released, refuting government claims that it is fighting terrorism,” Erdem noted.
Over 1,300 people were killed in the sarin gas attack in Ghouta and several other neighborhoods near the Syrian capital of Damascus, with the West quickly blaming the regime of Bashar al-Assad and Russia claiming it was a “false flag” operation aimed at making US military intervention in Syria possible.
Suburbs near Damascus were struck by rockets containing the toxic sarin gas in August 2013.
The purpose of the attack was allegedly to provoke a US military operation in Syria which would topple the Assad regime in line with the political agenda of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government.
CHP deputy Şeker spoke after Erdem, pointing out that the government misled the public on the issue by asserting that sarin was provided by Russia. The purpose was to create the perception that, according to Şeker, “Assad killed his people with sarin and that requires a US military intervention in Syria.”
He also underlined that all of the files and evidence from the investigation show a war crime was committed within the borders of the Turkish Republic.
“The investigation clearly indicates that those people who smuggled the chemicals required to procure sarin faced no difficulties, proving that Turkish intelligence was aware of their activities. While these people had to be in prison for their illegal acts, not a single person is in jail. Former prime ministers and the interior minister should be held accountable for their negligence in the incident,” Şeker further commented.
Erdem also added that he will launch a criminal complaint against those responsible, including those who issued a verdict of non-prosecution in the case, those who did not prevent the transfer of chemicals and those who first ordered the arrest of the suspects who were later released.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced in late August that an inquiry had been launched into the gas attacks allegedly perpetuated by both Assad’s Syrian regime and rebel groups fighting in Syria since the civil war erupted in 2011.
However, Erdem is not the only figure who has accused Turkey of possible involvement in the gas attack. Pulitzer Prize winner and journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, argued in an article published in 2014 that MİT was involved with extremist Syrian groups fighting against the Assad regime.
In this letter I did not even bother to say ‘dear anyone’ or ‘dear anything.’ Mailed to 18 senior parliamentarians inclusive of all political parties with sitting members. Here is the verbatim text:
An ISIS commander told The Washington Post on August 12, 2014: “Most of the fighters who joined us in the beginning of the war came via Turkey, and so did our equipment and supplies.”
Kemal Kiliadaroglu, head of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), produced a statement from the Adana Office of the Prosecutor on October 14, 2014 maintaining that Turkey supplied weapons to terror groups. He also produced interview transcripts from truck drivers who delivered weapons to the groups. According to Kiliadaroglu, the Turkish government claims the trucks were for humanitarian aid to the Turkmen, but the Turkmen said no humanitarian aid was delivered.
According to CHP Vice President Bulent Tezcan, three trucks were stopped in Adana for inspection on January 19, 2014. The trucks were loaded with weapons in Esenboga Airport in Ankara. The drivers drove the trucks to the border, where a MIT agent was supposed to take over and drive the trucks to Syria to deliver materials to ISIS and groups in Syria. This happened many times. When the trucks were stopped, MIT agents tried to keep the inspectors from looking inside the crates. The inspectors found rockets, arms, and ammunitions.
Cumhuriyet reports that Fuat Avni, a preeminent Twitter user who reported on the December 17th corruption probe, that audio tapes confirm that Turkey provided financial and military aid to terrorist groups associated with Al Qaeda on October 12, 2014. On the tapes, Erdogan pressured the Turkish Armed Forces to go to war with Syria. Erdogan demanded that Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (MIT), come up with a justification for attacking Syria.
Hakan Fidan told Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Yasar Guler, a senior defense official, and Feridun Sinirlioglu, a senior foreign affairs official: “If need be, I’ll send 4 men into Syria. I’ll formulate a reason to go to war by shooting 8 rockets into Turkey; I’ll have them attack the Tomb of Suleiman Shah.”
Documents surfaced on September 19th, 2014 showing that the Saudi Emir Bender Bin Sultan financed the transportation of arms to ISIS through Turkey. A flight leaving Germany dropped off arms in the Etimesgut airport in Turkey, which was then split into three containers, two of which were given to ISIS and one to Gaza.
Turkey Provided Transport and Logistical Assistance to ISIS Fighters
According to Radikal on June 13, 2014, Interior Minister Muammar Guler signed a directive: “According to our regional gains, we will help al-Nusra militants against the branch of PKK terrorist organization, the PYD, within our borders…Hatay is a strategic location for the mujahideen crossing from within our borders to Syria. Logistical support for Islamist groups will be increased, and their training, hospital care, and safe passage will mostly take place in Hatay…MIT and the Religious Affairs Directorate will coordinate the placement of fighters in public accommodations.”
The Daily Mail reported on August 25, 2014 that many foreign militants joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq after traveling through Turkey, but Turkey did not try to stop them. This article describes how foreign militants, especially from the UK, go to Syria and Iraq through the Turkish border. They call the border the “Gateway to Jihad.” Turkish army soldiers either turn a blind eye and let them pass, or the jihadists pay the border guards as little as $10 to facilitate their crossing.
Britain’s Sky News obtained documents showing that the Turkish government has stamped passports of foreign militants seeking to cross the Turkey border into Syria to join ISIS.
The BBC interviewed villagers, who claim that buses travel at night, carrying jihadists to fight Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, not the Syrian Armed Forces.
A senior Egyptian official indicated on October 9, 2014 that Turkish intelligence is passing satellite imagery and other data to ISIS.
Turkey Provided Training to ISIS Fighters
CNN Turk reported on July 29, 2014 that in the heart of Istanbul, places like Duzce and Adapazari, have become gathering spots for terrorists. There are religious orders where ISIS militants are trained. Some of these training videos are posted on the Turkish ISIS propaganda website takvahaber.net. According to CNN Turk, Turkish security forces could have stopped these developments if they had wanted to.
Turks who joined an affiliate of ISIS were recorded at a public gathering in Istanbul, which took place on July 28, 2014.
A video shows an ISIS affiliate holding a prayer/gathering in Omerli, a district of Istanbul. In response to the video, CHP Vice President, MP Tanrikulu submitted parliamentary questions to the Minister of the Interior, Efkan Ala, asking questions such as, “Is it true that a camp or camps have been allocated to an affiliate of ISIS in Istanbul? What is this affiliate? Who is it made up of? Is the rumor true that the same area allocated for the camp is also used for military exercises?”
Kemal Kiliçdaroglu warned the AKP government not to provide money and training to terror groups on October 14, 2014. He said, “It isn’t right for armed groups to be trained on Turkish soil. You bring foreign fighters to Turkey, put money in their pockets, guns in their hands, and you ask them to kill Muslims in Syria. We told them to stop helping ISIS. Ahmet Davutoglu asked us to show proof. Everyone knows that they’re helping ISIS.” (See HERE and HERE.)
According to Jordanian intelligence, Turkey trained ISIS militants for special operations.
Turkey Offers Medical Care to ISIS Fighters
An ISIS commander told the Washington Post on August 12, 2014, “We used to have some fighters — even high-level members of the Islamic State — getting treated in Turkish hospitals.”
Taraf reported on October 12, 2014 that Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, a founder of the AKP, said that Turkey supported terrorist groups and still supports them and treats them in hospitals. “In order to weaken the developments in Rojova (Syrian Kurdistan), the government gave concessions and arms to extreme religious groups…the government was helping the wounded. The Minister of Health said something such as, it’s a human obligation to care for the ISIS wounded.”
According to Taraf, Ahmet El H, one of the top commanders at ISIS and Al Baghdadi’s right hand man, was treated at a hospital in Sanliurfa, Turkey, along with other ISIS militants. The Turkish state paid for their treatment. According to Taraf’s sources, ISIS militants are being treated in hospitals all across southeastern Turkey. More and more militants have been coming in to be treated since the start of airstrikes in August. To be more specific, eight ISIS militants were transported through the Sanliurfa border crossing; these are their names: “Mustafa A., Yusuf El R., Mustafa H., Halil El M., Muhammet El H., Ahmet El S., Hasan H., [and] Salim El D.”
Turkey Supports ISIS Financially Through Purchase of Oil
On September 13, 2014, The New York Timesreported on the Obama administration’s efforts to pressure Turkey to crack down on ISIS extensive sales network for oil. James Phillips, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, argues that Turkey has not fully cracked down on ISIS’s sales network because it benefits from a lower price for oil, and that there might even be Turks and government officials who benefit from the trade.
Fehim Tastekin wrote in Radikal on September 13, 2014 about illegal pipelines transporting oil from Syria to nearby border towns in Turkey. The oil is sold for as little as 1.25 liras per liter. Tastekin indicated that many of these illegal pipelines were dismantled after operating for 3 years, once his article was published.
According to Diken and OdaTV, David Cohen, a Justice Department official, says that there are Turkish individuals acting as middlemen to help sell ISIS’s oil through Turkey.
On October 14, 2014, a German Parliamentarian from the Green Party accused Turkey of allowing the transportation of arms to ISIS over its territory, as well as the sale of oil.
Turkey Assists ISIS Recruitment
Kemal Kiliadaroglu claimed on October 14, 2014 that ISIS offices in Istanbul and Gaziantep are used to recruit fighters. On October 10, 2014, the mufti of Konya said that 100 people from Konya joined ISIS 4 days ago. (See HERE and HERE.)
OdaTV reports that Takva Haber serves as a propaganda outlet for ISIS to recruit Turkish-speaking individuals in Turkey and Germany. The address where this propaganda website is registered corresponds to the address of a school called Irfan Koleji, which was established by Ilim Yayma Vakfi, a foundation that was created by Erdogan and Davutoglu, among others. It is thus claimed that the propaganda site is operated from the school of the foundation started by AKP members.
Minister of Sports, Suat Kilic, an AKP member, visited Salafi jihadists who are ISIS supporters in Germany. The group is known for reaching out to supporters via free Quran distributions and raising funds to sponsor suicide attacks in Syria and Iraq by raising money.
OdaTV released a video allegedly showing ISIS militants riding a bus in Istanbul.
Turkish Forces Are Fighting Alongside ISIS
On October 7, 2014, IBDA-C, a militant Islamic organization in Turkey, pledged support to ISIS. A Turkish friend who is a commander in ISIS suggests that Turkey is “involved in all of this” and that “10,000 ISIS members will come to Turkey.” A Huda-Par member at the meeting claims that officials criticize ISIS but in fact sympathize with the group (Huda-Par, the “Free Cause Party”, is a Kurdish Sunni fundamentalist political party). BBP member claims that National Action Party (MHP) officials are close to embracing ISIS. In the meeting, it is asserted that ISIS militants come to Turkey frequently to rest, as though they are taking a break from military service. They claim that Turkey will experience an Islamic revolution, and Turks should be ready for jihad. (See HERE and HERE.)
Seymour Hersh maintains in the London Review of Books that ISIS conducted sarin attacks in Syria, and that Turkey was informed. “For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbors, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdogan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.”
On September 20, 2014, Demir Celik, a Member of Parliament with the people’s democratic party (HDP) claimed that Turkish Special Forces fight with ISIS.
Turkey Helped ISIS in Battle for Kobani
Anwar Moslem, Mayor of Kobani, said on September 19, 2014: “Based on the intelligence we got two days before the breakout of the current war, trains full of forces and ammunition, which were passing by north of Kobane, had an-hour-and-ten-to-twenty-minute-long stops in these villages: Salib Qaran, Gire Sor, Moshrefat Ezzo. There are evidences, witnesses, and videos about this. Why is ISIS strong only in Kobane’s east? Why is it not strong either in its south or west? Since these trains stopped in villages located in the east of Kobane, we guess they had brought ammunition and additional force for the ISIS.” In the second article on September 30, 2014, a CHP delegation visited Kobani, where locals claimed that everything from the clothes ISIS militants wear to their guns comes from Turkey. (See HERE and HERE.)
Released by Nuhaber, a video shows Turkish military convoys carrying tanks and ammunition moving freely under ISIS flags in the Cerablus region and Karkamis border crossing (September 25, 2014). There are writings in Turkish on the trucks.
Salih Muslim, PYD head, claims that 120 militants crossed into Syria from Turkey between October 20th and 24th, 2014.
According to an op-ed written by a YPG commander in The New York Times on October 29, 2014, Turkey allows ISIS militants and their equipment to pass freely over the border.
Diken reported, “ISIS fighters crossed the border from Turkey into Syria, over the Turkish train tracks that delineate the border, in full view of Turkish soldiers. They were met there by PYD fighters and stopped.”
A Kurdish commander in Kobani claims that ISIS militants have Turkish entry stamps on their passports.
Kurds trying to join the battle in Kobani are turned away by Turkish police at the Turkey-Syrian border.
OdaTV released a photograph of a Turkish soldier befriending ISIS militants.…
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Ronald Thomas West 