With the looming decisive second round in the French elections, there is renewed scrutiny on the National Front and its titular head Marine Le Pen.
Networked with various figures ranging from the milieu of Donald Trump to that of Turkish president Erdogan, the National Front and the Le Pens (father Jean-Marie and daughter Marine) are carrying on the fascist tradition in France.
The second of two shows, this program continues our examination of French deep politics, scrutinizing powerful economic and financial arrangements that determined the Franco-German political dynamic throughout most of the twentieth century and, thus far, through the twenty-first as well.
Critical to our understanding is the dynamic of occupying the high ground on both sides of a political divide. This program underscores how this has placed Germany in a key strategic position on both sides of key political struggles: In the pre-World War II era and postwar era as well; In the right-left political divide in French politics; In the struggle between anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim advocates such as the National Front and Muslim-Brotherhood linked elements in the Islamist community.
Key elements of discussion include:
1. Review of Steve Bannon’s ideological fondness for French anti-Semite and Vichy collaborationist Charles Maurras. Maurras’ Action Francaise is a direct antecedent of the National Front. ” . . . . One of the primary progenitors of the party was the Action Française, founded at the end of the 19th century. . . .”
2. Review of the relationship between former president Francois Mitterand (a socialist) and French Holocaust implementer and Vichy police official Rene Bousquet, who was close to Mitterand and helped to finance his campaign and those of other left-wing French politicians. With financial influence in left-wing parties, Germany can help motivate the French left to band together to defeat the French National Front and its anti-EU, anti-NATO ideology. Potential leftists can also be channelled into an anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim position along that of the National Front. ” . . . . . . . The most damning of all charges against Mitterrand and his right wing connections is probably his long lasting friendship with René Bousquet, ex secrétaire général of the Vichy police. . . . In 1974, René Bousquet gave financial help to François Mitterrand for his presidential campaign against Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. In an interview with Pierre Favier et Michel Martin-Roland Mitterrand claimed that he was not the only left wing politician to benefit from Bousquet’s money, as René Bousquet helped finance all the principal left wing politicians from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s, including Pierre Mendès France. . . .”
3. Discussion of Francois Mitterand’s primary role in establishing the Euro, as a prerequisite for German reunification (his alleged “fear” of a reunified Germany should be taken with a grain of salt in light of his collaborationist background and relationship with Rene Bousquet: ” . . . . He [Robert Zoellick] explained his understanding of how Europe got its common currency. . . . it was very clear that European monetary union resulted from French-German tensions before unification and was meant to calm Mitterrand’s fears of an all-too-powerful Germany. According to Zoellick, the euro currency is a by-product of German unification. . . . in strategic terms, Germany’s influence has never been greater. As the continent wants to bank on Germany’s AAA rating, Berlin can now effectively dictate fiscal policy to Athens, Lisbon and Rome – perhaps in the future to Paris, too. . .”
4. More about the Euro (launched with the critically important assistance of Francois Mitterand: “. . . . It [the euro] has turned the Germans into the new rulers of Europe. And it has consigned France to be the weaker partner in the Franco-German relationship. . . .”
5. Analysis of the decisive relationship between French steelmakers belonging to the Comite des Forges and their German counterparts and Ruhr coal producers, one of the foundational elements of the Fifth Column that is antecedent to the National Front: ” . . . . The struggle of the interwar period was not simply a clash between French interests on the one side and German interests on the other. During the development of the Ruhr-Lorraine industrial complex, like-minded industrialists in France and Germany had become directors of jointly owned and jointly controlled financial, industrial, and distributing enterprises. In many cases common views on questions of economic organization, labor policy, social legislation, and attitude toward government had been far more important to the industrialists than differences of nationality or citizenship. . . . ”
6. The economic collaboration between French and German oligarchs worked to the advantage of Germany: ” . . . .It is curious to note that only the French appeared to have this conflict between public policy and private activities. On the German side, complete co-ordination seems to have been preserved between national and private interests; between officials of the German Republic and the leaders of German industry and finance. . . .”
7. Exemplifying the operation of the pro-German Fifth Column in the Ruhr-Lorraine industrial complex is the relationship between the De Wendel and Rochling interests: ” . . . . During World War I the De Wendels, the influential French-German banking and industrial family which headed the French wing of the International Steel Cartel through their Comite des Forges and whose members had sat in the parliaments of both France and Germany, were able to keep the French army from destroying industrial plants belonging to the German enterprises of the Rochling family. . . . . . . . The Rochling family, with their powerful complex of coal, iron, steel and banking enterprises in Germany, has for generations played in close harmony with the de Wendel family. . . .”
8. The De Wendel/Rochling links were so profound that the Rochlings were called upon to help build the French defensive Maginot Line: ” . . . . On the other hand, as far as the French steel makers’ association, the Comite des Forges, and in particular the de Wendels who headed the Comite, were concerned, it was business as usual-or in this case, business as unusual-that prevailed. . . . When it came time for France to build its impregnable Maginot Line, who should be called in to supply steel and technical assistance but the German firm of the brothers Rochling. . . .”
9. After the French capitulation, the Vichy government–to no one’s surprise–exonerated the Rochlings: ” . . . . Now comes the outbreak of World War II. The French army marching into the Saar during the ‘phony war’ period in 1939, received orders not to fire on or damage the plants of the ‘war criminals,’ the brothers Rochling. In 1940 came the blitz and the fall of France. The Vichy government passed a decree exonerating the Rochlings and canceling their forty-year prison sentences. . . .”
10. The Franco-German steel cartel, in turn, belonged to an international steel cartel featuring the Thyssen firm Vereinigte Stahlwerke (later Thyssen A.G.). The Thyssen interests are inextricably linked with the Bormann capital network. The Thyssens’ principal American contacts were the Bush family. ” . . . . They marked the formation of the United Steel Works in Germany, as a combination of the four biggest steel producers Ernst Poensgen, Fritz Thyssen, Otto Wolff, and the others who drew this combine together had managed to get over a hundred million dollars from private investors in the United States. Dillon Read & Company, the New York investment house which brought Clarence Dillon, James V. Forrestal, William H. Draper, Jr., and others into prominence, floated the United Steel Works bonds in the United States . . . . ”
11. During the occupation of France, the Franco-German corporate connection yielded further German capital domination of French firms: ” . . . The Third Republic’s business elite was virtually unchanged after 1940. . . . They regarded the war and Hitler as an unfortunate diversion from their chief mission of preventing a communist revolution in France. Antibolshevism was a common denominator linking these Frenchmen to Germans. . . . The upper-class men who had been superbly trained in finance and administration at one of the two grand corps schools were referred to as France’s permanent ‘wall of money,’ and as professionals they came into their own in 1940. They agreed to the establishment of German subsidiary firms in France and permitted a general buy-in to French companies. . . .
12. The Franco-German corporate links and the domination of that relationship by corporate Germany and the Bormann network continued into the postwar period: ” . . . . Society’s natural survivors, French version, who had served the Third Reich as an extension of German industry, would continue to do so in the period of postwar trials, just as they had survived the war, occupation, and liberation. These were many of the French elite, the well-born, the propertied, the titled, the experts, industrialists, businessmen, bureaucrats, bankers. . . . Economic collaboration in France with the Germans had been so widespread (on all levels of society) that there had to be a realization that an entire nation could not be brought to trial. . . .”
13. Corporate German/Bormann control of French commerce and finance is the determining factor in contemporary French affairs: ” . . . . The understandings arrived at in the power structure of France reach back to prewar days, were continued during the occupation, and have carried over to the present time. [New York Times reporter Flora] Lewis, in her report from Paris, commented further: ‘This hidden control of government and corporations has produced a general unease in Paris.’ Along with the unease, the fact that France has lingering and serious social and political ailments is a residue of World War II and of an economic occupation that was never really terminated with the withdrawal of German troops beyond the Rhine. . . .”
14. The Franco-German corporate Axis facilitated the De Wendel family’s postwar assistance of Friedrich Flick, another of Hitler’s top industrialists.: ” . . . . The understandings arrived at in the power structure of France reach back to prewar days, were continued during the occupation, and have carried over to the present time. Lewis, in her report from Paris, commented further: ‘This hidden control of government and corporations has produced a general unease in Paris.’ Along with the unease, the fact that France has lingering and serious social and political ailments is a residue of World War II and of an economic occupation that was never really terminated with the withdrawal of German troops beyond the Rhine. . . .”
15. The seamless incorporation of the Franco-German corporate axis into the German-dominated EU and EMU has yielded the ability of the Federal Republic to interfere in the French political process: ” . . . . Like Fillon, Macron is considered ‘Germany-compatible’ by a German think tank, whereas all other candidates are viewed as unsuitable for ‘constructive cooperation’ because of their criticism of the EU and/or of NATO. Recently, Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble ostentatiously recommended voting for Macron. Berlin’s interference on behalf of Macron shows once again that German domination of the EU does not stop at national borders, and – according to a well-known EU observer – surpasses by far Russia’s feeble meddling in France. . . .”
The program concludes with rumination about the role of anti-Muslim sentiment in the French and U.S. political process and the presence of Underground Reich-linked elements on both the “anti-immigrant” side and the Islamist/Muslim Brotherhood side.
Program Highlights Include:
1. Review of the Islamist/Muslim Brotherhood Turkish Refah Party (the direct antecedent of Erdogan’s AKP) and its relationship to Ahmed Huber of the Bank Al-Taqwa.
2. Review of the role of Ahmed Huber (later of the Bank Al-Taqwa) in introducing Turkish Muslim Brotherhood’s Necmettin Erbakan with Marine Le Pen’s father: ” . . . . . . . . A second photograph, in which Hitler is talking with Himmler, hangs next to those of Necmettin Erbakan and Jean-Marie Le Pen [leader of the fascist National Front]. Erbakan, head of the Turkish Islamist party, Refah, turned to Achmed Huber for an introduction to the chief of the French party of the far right. Exiting from the meeting . . . . Huber’s two friends supposedly stated that they ‘share the same view of the world’ and expressed ‘their common desire to work together to remove the last racist obstacles that still prevent the union of the Islamist movement with the national right of Europe.’. . .”
3. Review of The Camp of the Saints, a racist, anti-immigrant book valued both by French National Front types and Trump advisor Steve Bannon.
Supplementing FTR #954, this broadcast continues analysis of the alleged Assad government chemical weapons attack. Key points of discussion include:
1. Further analysis by MIT expert Theodore Postol, who sees the photographic evidence alleged to support the Trump administration’s allegations as questionable. ” . . . ‘This addendum provides data that unambiguously shows that the assumption in the WHR that there was no tampering with the alleged site of the sarin release is not correct. This egregious error raises questions about every other claim in the WHR. … The implication of this observation is clear – the WHR was not reviewed and released by any competent intelligence expert unless they were motivated by factors other than concerns about the accuracy of the report. . . .”
2. Particularly suspicious (laughable?) is a picture showing personnel examining the purported sarin attack site with woefully inadequate protective clothing. ” . . . . ‘If there were any sarin present at this location when this photograph was taken everybody in the photograph would have received a lethal or debilitating dose of sarin. The fact that these people were dressed so inadequately either suggests a complete ignorance of the basic measures needed to protect an individual from sarin poisoning, or that they knew that the site was not seriously contaminated. This is the crater that is the centerpiece evidence provided in the WHR for a sarin attack delivered by a Syrian aircraft.’ . . . . ”
3. Questionable analysis in the alleged chlorine gas attacks also attributed to the al-Assad regime. ” . . . In one of the chlorine cases, however, Syrian eyewitnesses came forward to testify that the rebels had staged the alleged attack so it could be blamed on the government. In that incident, the U.N. team reached no conclusion as to what had really happened, but neither did the investigators – now alerted to the rebels’ tactic of staging chemical attacks – apply any additional skepticism to the other cases. In one case, the rebels and their supporters also claimed to know that an alleged ‘barrel bomb’ contained a canister of chlorine because of the sound that it made while descending. There was no explanation for how that sort of detection was even possible. . . .”
4. A British doctor who was a focal point of PR coverage of the alleged sarin attack has a jihadist background. ” . . . . A British doctor who documented a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria was considered a ‘committed jihadist’ by MI6 and was struck off the General Medical Council in 2016. Shajul Islam, 31, posted several videos on Twitter in the aftermath of the Tuesday’s (4 April) attack where he appeared to be treating patients in Khan Sheikhoun. He appeared on several television networks such as NBC to discuss what he saw, but it has now emerged Islam was previously charged on terror offences in the UK. . . .”
4. The underlying strategic reason for some of the Trump/Russian interface, one that dovetails with the Syrian provocation/escalation: ” . . . . The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. The meeting took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said. Though the full agenda remains unclear, the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective . . . .”
5. George W. Bush administration officials are confident another terrorist attack is coming appear to be concerned that the Trump could use terror to grab and abuse executive powers. We present some of their thoughts against the background of our discussion in FTR #953 about Bernie Sanders’ paving the way for Muslim Brotherhood-linked elements: ” . . . . ‘We can assume there will be another terrorist attack in the U.S. If the executive order is in place, he will point to the attack as support for the executive order and the need to expand it to other countries with bad dudes (Muslims). If the executive order has been struck down, Trump will blame judges and Democrats for the attack. . . .’We both wholly believe that Trump needs a bogeyman. But, more importantly, he needs distraction and a blame source. In terrorists, he has his bogeyman. In his control of the prevailing press narrative via tweet, he has distraction. And, in the judiciary, he has a source of blame for why his way was right from the beginning.’ . . . . ‘I am fully confident that an attack is exactly what he wants and needs.’ . . . .”
Whereas the Syrian alleged sarin incident appears to have been effected by some of the West’s al-Qaeda surrogates in the conflict, past provocations have involved more direct involvement by elements of the intelligence community. In May of 1963, with then South Vietnamese president Diem pushing for a reduction in U.S. forces in Vietnam (against American wishes), a bombing occurred at a Hue radio station that was the focal point of Buddhist protests of the government’s policy toward Buddhists. The authorship of that attack and a 1952 Saigon bombing, was not the Vietcong.
Key points of analysis:
1. The May, 1963 attack in Hue: “ . . . . As Dang Sy and his security officers were approaching the area in armored cars about fifty meters away, two powerful explosions blasted the people on the veranda of the station, killing seven on the spot and fatally wounding a child. At least fifteen others were injured. . . .”
2. Forensic analysis of the wounds of the victims: “ . . . Dr. Le Khac Quyen, the hospital director at Hue, said after examining the victims’ bodies that he had never seen such injuries. The bodies had been decapitated. He found no metal in the corpses, only holes. There were no wounds below the chest. In his official finding, Dr. Quyen ruled that ‘the death of the people was caused by an explosion which took place in mid-air, blowing off their heads and mutilating their bodies.’ . . . ”
3. Dr. Quyen’s conclusions about the source of the victims’ wounds in the 1963 attack: “ . . . . The absence of any metal in the bodies or on the radio station’s veranda pointed to powerful plastic bombs as the source of the explosions. . . .”
4. Analysis of the 1952 bombing in Saigon: “ . . . . Who did possess such powerful plastic bombs? An answer is provided by Graham Greene’s prophetic novel The Quiet American, based on historical events that occurred in Saigon eleven years before the bombing in Hue. Greene was in Saigon on January 9, 1952, when two bombs exploded in the city’s center, killing ten and injuring many more. A picture of the scene, showing a man with his legs blown off, appeared in Life magazine as the ‘Picture of the Week.’ The Life caption said the Saigon bombs had been ‘planted by Viet Minh Communists’ and ‘signaled general intensification of the Viet Minh violence.’ In like manner, the New York Times headlined: ‘Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center.’ . . .”
5. In the 1952 bombing, the operational coordination between U.S. media outlets and the perpetrators of the attack is noteworthy for our purposes: “ . . . . General The’s bombing material, a U.S. plastic, had been supplied to him by his sponsor, the Central Intelligence Agency. Greene observed in his memoir, Ways of Escape, it was no coincidence that ‘the Life photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw driver still upright after his legs had been blown off.’ The CIA had set the scene, alerting the Life photographer and Times reporter so they could convey the terrorist bombing as the work of ‘Viet Minh Communists’ to a mass audience. . . .”
6. South Vietnamese investigation of the May, 1963 attack, arrived at a conclusion similar to Graham Greene’s discovery in the 1952 attack: “ . . . . According to an investigation carried by the Catholic newspaper Hoa Binh. . . . a Captain Scott . . . . had come to Hue from Da Nang on May 7, 1963. He admitted he was the American agent responsible for the bombing at the radio station the next day. He said he used ‘an explosive that was still secret and known only to certain people in the Central Intelligence Agency, a charge no larger than a matchbox with a timing device.’. . . .”
In the wake of the alleged sarin attack by Bashar al-Assad’s government and the cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base by the U.S., we examine some of the relevant issues in the crisis, including and especially intelligence evaluations sharply divergent from the official version:
a). We begin with analysis of the area (Idlib) where the alleged Syrian government sarin attack took place. It is dominated by the Al-Nusra Front, the name given to Al-Qaeda in Iraq when it operates in Syria. Note that the top cleric in the Al-Qaeda held area is Abdullah Muhaysini, a Saudi cleric: ” . . . . who was a student [25] of Sulayman Al-Alwan, the Wahhabi cleric who oversaw what his Muslim critics have called a ‘terrorist factory [26]’ in Saudi Arabia’s Al-Qassim Province. Al-Alwan was also the instructor of the 9/11 hijacker Abdulaziz Alomari. . . .”
b.) Saddam and bin Laden worked out an arrangement in which Iraq—in order to provide for a payback capability if the U.S. ousted him—gave information about WMD’s to bin Laden’s people. Al Qaeda, in turn, was to act as a back-up unit for Saddam’s Iraq, striking at the United States if it knocked out Saddam. ” . . . . According to Arab sources, in anticipation of a foreseeable reversal of alliances in Kabul, bin Laden had been in discreet contact since September 2000 with associates of Oudai Hussein. . . . Bin Laden and the Iraqis are said to have exchanged information about chemical and biological weapons, despite the opposition of some of the Baghdad leadership, including Tarik Aziz. . . .”
c). Robert Parry notes in Consortium News that elements in the U.S. intelligence community do not agree with the Trump administration’s assessment of the situation. ” . . . . Alarm within the U.S. intelligence community about Trump’s hasty decision to attack Syria reverberated from the Middle East back to Washington, where former CIA officer Philip Giraldi reported hearing from his intelligence contacts in the field that they were shocked at how the new poison-gas story was being distorted by Trump and the mainstream U.S. news media. Giraldi told Scott Horton’s Webcast: ‘I’m hearing from sources on the ground in the Middle East, people who are intimately familiar with the intelligence that is available who are saying that the essential narrative that we’re all hearing about the Syrian government or the Russians using chemical weapons on innocent civilians is a sham.’ . . .”
d.) Parry also notes that some analysts are reporting a strike by a drone launched from a joint Saudi-Israeli base that supports Syrian rebels. ” . . . Despite some technical difficulties in tracing its flight path, analysts eventually came to believe that the flight was launched in Jordan from a Saudi-Israeli special operations base for supporting Syrian rebels, the source said, adding that the suspected reason for the poison gas was to create an incident that would reverse the Trump administration’s announcement in late March that it was no longer seeking the removal of President Bashar al-Assad. . . .”
e.) Parry concludes one of his articles with a scathing analysis of the Trump administration’s claims by a MIT researcher: ” . . . . In a separate analysis of the four-page dossier, Theodore Postol, a national security specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concluded that the White House claims were clearly bogus, writing: ‘I have reviewed the document carefully, and I believe it can be shown, without doubt, that the document does not provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria at roughly 6 to 7 a.m. on April 4, 2017. In fact, a main piece of evidence that is cited in the document points to an attack that was executed by individuals on the ground, not from an aircraft, on the morning of April 4. This conclusion is based on an assumption made by the White House when it cited the source of the sarin release and the photographs of that source. My own assessment, is that the source was very likely tampered with or staged, so no serious conclusion could be made from the photographs cited by the White House.’ . . . ”
f.) Detailed analysis of an August, 2013 sarin attack, originally thought to have been perpetrated by Bashar Al-Assad, was presented by Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books. The sarin turns out not to have come from Syrian government stockpiles. “. . . . Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. . . .”
g.) Al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda), on the other hand, was producing Sarin and looking to ramp up production through a supply pipeline running through Turkey. ” . . . . The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. . . .”
h.) The 2013 conclusions of general Martin Dempsey are worth examining in the context of the current crisis: ” . . . . From the beginning of the crisis, the former intelligence official said, the joint chiefs had been skeptical of the administration’s argument that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad’s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the war,’ the former intelligence official said. . . .”
Program Highlights Include:
1. Review of the corporatist economic foundation of Muslim Brotherhood developmental theory. “. . . . The Muslim Brotherhood hails 14th century philosopher Ibn Khaldun as its economic guide. Anticipating supply-side economics, Khaldun argued that cutting taxes raises production and tax revenues . . . The World Bank has called Ibn Khaldun the first advocate of privatization. . . .”
2. Review of Graham E. Fuller’s support for the economic values of the Muslim Brotherhood and his strange support for Bernie Sanders, whose values are the opposite of those espoused by Fuller.
3. The fact that war in the Middle East raises oil prices–this to be seen against the background of Rex Tillerson being Secretary of State (previously CEO of Exxon/Mobil). ” . . . . For investors like Mr. Abdullah, conflict in the Middle East means one thing: higher oil prices. ‘It’s always good for us,’ he says. . . .”
4. Robert Parry’s view that the omission of CIA director Mike Pompeo and other top U.S. intelligence officials from a photo of Trump’s top advisors is indicative of dissent within the intelligence community from the official version of the attack.
Against the background of Trumpian political volatility made manifest in Syria, we look at St. Bernard [Sanders] and the implications of actions he has taken. This program is presented in the context of the “shock to the system” that Steve Bannon and other Trump advisers see as necessary and imminent.
After detailing more about the Hungarian fascist manifestations of Sebastian Gorka, the Trump administration’s point man for counter-jihadism, the program turns to the possible use of the Sanders campaign as a vehicle for the GOP to infiltrate and/or maneuver jihadist elements into prominence in the Democratic Party.
In numerous programs, we have noted the suppression of Operation Green Quest, which targeted individuals and institutions linked to the Al-Taqwa/Muslim Brotherhood milieu on the one hand, and to the Karl Rove/Grover Norquist-generated Islamic Free Market Institute on the other. Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and Graham E. Fuller, the Muslim Brotherhood’s and jihadis’ most significant backer in the intelligence community, factor into this analysis:
1. Rove financed Sanders campaign through the American Crossroads super-PAC. ” . . . American Crossroads—founded by former Bush adviser Karl Rove—and several other conservative-backed super PACs have spent the last month intentionally fueling the Bern, but their zeal has more to do with an effort to weaken Hillary Clinton, whom they still see as the likely Democratic nominee and harder to defeat in the general election. . . . Crossroads is one of several groups that has released ads that have been aimed at branding Sanders as the only true progressive in the race—a strategy the Vermont senator’s campaign also embraces. . . .”
2. Graham E. Fuller says that he was ” . . . . galvanized at watching the spectacle of Bernie Sanders proclaiming issues in his campaign that had been virtually off limits for political discussion for decades: gap between rich and poor, rapacious international trade deals, a fair wage, free university education, the call for US balance (gasp!) in handling the Arab-Israeli, issue, etc. The great thing about Bernie — even if he probably won’t get nominated — is that he has pushed hawkish, friend-of-Wall-Street Hillary to the left. . . .”
3. Fuller’s actual views are the opposite of Sanders policy points: “. . . Fuller comes from that faction of CIA Cold Warriors who believed (and still apparently believe) that fundamentalist Islam, even in its radical jihadi form, does not pose a threat to the West, for the simple reason that fundamentalist Islam is conservative, against social justice, against socialism and redistribution of wealth, and in favor of hierarchical socio-economic structures. Socialism is the common enemy to both capitalist America and to Wahhabi Islam, according to Fuller. . . ‘There is no mainstream Islamic organization…with radical social views,’ he wrote. ‘Classical Islamic theory envisages the role of the state as limited to facilitating the well-being of markets and merchants rather than controlling them. Islamists have always powerfully objected to socialism and communism….Islam has never had problems with the idea that wealth is unevenly distributed.’ . . . .”
4. Faisal Gill, a former operations director for Norquist’s Islamic Free Market Institute and official with George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security is now the head of Vermont’s Democratic Party, a post he has used to join Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard to promote Keith Ellison as head of the Democratic National Committee. Ellison is now the deputy chair of the DNC, the post formerly held by Gabbard. ” . . . . Yet some officials remain concerned that Gill apparently enjoys the political protection of Norquist, the architect of the 1994 Republican election sweep that brought Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich to power as House speaker. Norquist speaks of ‘crushing’ his political opponents and dismisses those who don’t agree with his anti-tax, anti-government agenda as ‘Bolsheviks.’ His power derives from a formidable coalition of evangelical, business and other conservative groups that he controls to push favored GOP issues, as well as from his close relationship with White House political chief Karl Rove. . . .”
The program also notes a number of other things about the Sanders campaign:
1. He was promoting open primaries for the Democratic Party, which would enable Karl Rove and the Republicans to choose the Democratic nominee.
2. Sanders was a Presidential elector for the Socialist Workers Party, embracing a stance which would have made him terminally vulnerable had he gotten the Democratic nomination. ” . . . . In 1980, Sanders served as an elector for the Socialist Workers Party, which was founded on the principles of Leon Trotsky. According to the New York Times, that party called for abolishing the military budget. It also called for “solidarity” with the revolutionary regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Cuba; this was in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis. . . .”
3. The SWP was a vehicle for infiltration and the acquisition of a “left cover” by Nazis and spooks, including Lee Harvey Oswald.
4. The Third Reich saw Leon Trotsky’s methodology as worthy of emulation. (The SWP is a Trotskyite political party.) ” . . . . ‘You should read his books,’ he [Hitler] barked. ‘We can learn a lot from him.’ . . .”
5. To what extent have the GOP and the overlapping Underground Reich focused on Sanders (without his knowledge) as a vehicle for infiltrating the Democratic Party? In FTR #’s 941, 942 and 945, we noted the numerous fascist connections of Tulsi Gabbard, one of the driving forces behind Sanders’ ascent. To what extent has the Trotskyite template served as a vehicle for Gabbard, and, perhaps, Ellison to infiltrate the Democratic Party?
This broadcast updates coverage of key aspects of the Nazi/fascist, oops, we mean “alt-right,” milieu that moved into government courtesy of the Trumpenkampfverbande and Breitbart.
Further developing the terrifying reality of what Artificial Intellligence (AI) can accomplish for the dedicated fascist, oops, we mean “alt-right” adherent, we note an important address given at SXSW. Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford gave a speech titled “Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism.” The presentation highlighted the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems. The take home message? By delegating powers to Bid Data-driven AIs, those AIs could become fascist’s dream: Incredible power over the lives of others with minimal accountability: ” . . . .’This is a fascist’s dream,’ she said. ‘Power without accountability.’ . . . .”
Turning next to the political philosophy of Steve Bannon and the seminal influences on its development, we refresh our acquaintance with Curtis Yarvin, aka “Mencius Moldbug,” a herald of the Dark Enlightment.
Curtis Yarvin has actually opened a backchannel advisory connection to the White House.
Note that the Bannon influences all seem to agree that what is needed is “a shock to the system.” We may very well experience just that. ” . . . . . . . . Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. . . . ”
Fascist philosopher Julius Evola is another of the key influences on Bannon. Evola was an early occult fascist, with strong connections with Mussolini’s Italy. Eventually Evola established strong, lasting connections with the Nazi SS, both operationally and ideologically.
He is another advocate of the “shock to the system”/”blow it up” approach to the status quo. ” . . . Changing the system, Evola argued, was ‘not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.’ . . . .”
A revealing influence on Bannon is a French novel The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. “. . . . The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. ‘The Fall of Constantinople,’ Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, ‘is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.’ . . . . ”
In FTR #947, we highlighted Sebastian Gorka, a Breitbart alumnus and Hungarian fascist. Gorka is now the Trump administration’s point man working against Islamic terrorism. His view (and Bannon’s) that we are engaged in an historic clash of civilizations. That is precisely the point of view expressed by ISIS (and The Camp of the Saints) and will play into their hands.
That, in turn, will help propel the U.S. into more endless wars on the periphery of our empire, ultimately sapping the nation’s vitality and leading to the fall of the U.S. in a manner delineated in FTR #944.
After reviewing Gorka’s anti-Semitism, his profound connections to three generations of Hungarian fascism dating to the pre-World War II period and confirmation of his allegiance to the Order of Vitezi Rend, we highlight the fact that Gorka is part of the Strategic Initiatives Group, something of a parallel NSC formed by Steve Bannon. It reminds us of Hitler’s creation of a parallel general staff, born of a mistrust of his own senior officers and a desire to have a trusted cadre to obey his orders.
” . . . . In the United States, Gorka, who was appointed deputy assistant to the president on January 20, is known as a television commentator, a professor and an “alt-right” writer who describes himself as a counterterrorism expert. A close associate of Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, Gorka is now part of Bannon’s key in-house White House think tank, the Strategic Initiatives Group. The newly formed group consists of figures close to Trump and is seen by some as a rival to the National Security Council in formulating policies for the president. . . .”
The conclusion of the program foreshadows discussion in our next broadcast, which will critically examine Bernie Sanders campaign and disturbing indications that his candidacy may have been generated by the Underground Reich as a vehicle for infiltrating and destabilizing the Democratic Party.
In FTR #941, we highlighted the push by Bernie Sanders and his prominent backer Tulsi Gabbard to have Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim to be head of the DNC. He was not elected head of the DNC, but is now deputy chair of the DNC, the position formerly held by Gabbard.
Ellison is networked with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Nation of Islam as well. ” . . . . Indeed, the June 21, 1998 article states that at that time – that is, three years after Farrakhan’s march – Ellison was a member of the Nation of Islam: ‘Ellison has been active in the community, but not within the established DFL party [the Democratic Party in Minnesota]. A member of the Nation of Islam, Ellison was the coordinator of the Minnesota participants in the Million Man March and the subsequent community group that formed.’ . . . .”
In a point of discussion that will be conducted at greater length in our next program, we conclude by noting that another of Keith Ellison’s supporters to head the DNC was Faisal Gill, a Grover Norquist protege whom we covered in FTR #467.
Program Highlights Include: review of Gorka’s formation of a fascist party in Hungary in the last decade; review of Gorka’s doctrinaire anti-Semitism; review of Gorka’s networking with members of the Jobbik Party in Hungary; review of Gorka’s supportive attitude toward the Arrow Cross Party, which allied with Hitler; review of Jobbik’s affinity with Julius Evola; review of Karl Rove’s and Grover Norquist’s seminal support for the creation of a Muslim Brotherhood branch of the GOP.
With the (justifiable) outrage swirling around FBI director (and Mitt Romney backer) James Comey’s public discussion of the discovery of more of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails having been discovered, another election-related investigation has gone largely unexamined. Indeed, the importance of the investigation has been downplayed.
Computer experts discovered a link between a server registered to the Trump organization and two servers registered to the Alfa Bank in Moscow, a bank that is part of the Alfa conglomerate discussed in FTR #’s 530 and 573.
In the Foer piece, and in attempted discrediting articles of same, it is apparent that the investigators do not understand the nature of the entity they are investigating. The journalistic “spin” put on Alfa in the coverage is “Russia/Putin/Kremlin” new Cold War context. Alfa is very, very different.
In FTR #’s 530, 573 we examnined the nature of Alfa’s history, operations and institutional and economic foundations. It is anything BUT “Kremlin/Putin/Russia.”
It appears to be Underground Reich, all the way, with evidentiary tributaries running in the direction of: the Iran-Contra scandal; the Iraqgate scandal; the oil-for-food scam vis a vis Iraq; malfeasanace by a coterie of GOP bigwigs including Dick Cheney and others close to George W. Bush, and Haley Barbour; money-laundering by powerful international drug syndicates; Chechen warlords and drug-trafficking syndicates; the Royal family of Liechtenstein; the Bank al-Taqwa (which helped finance al-Qaeda); the Marc Rich operations; Eastern European and Russian associates of Wolfgang Bohringer, one of Mohamed Atta’s close associates in South Florida; and the Carl Duisberg Fellowship, which brought Mohamed Atta to Germany from Egypt and may have helped him into the U.S.
The program highlights major aspects of the investigation into the Alfa/Trump link:
The Trump/Alfa link was not a malware attack, as some of the computer scientists initially thought: ” . . . . The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank. . . .”
The set-up was highly unusual: ” . . . . The researchers had initially stumbled in their diagnosis because of the odd configuration of Trump’s server. ‘I’ve never seen a server set up like that,’ says Christopher Davis, who runs the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc. and won a FBI Director Award for Excellence for his work tracking down the authors of one of the world’s nastiest botnet attacks. ‘It looked weird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.’ The server was first registered to Trump’s business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump. (Click here to see the server’s registration record.) But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. ‘I get more mail in a day than the server handled,’ Davis says. . . .”
The article details more unusual aspects of the link: ” . . . . That wasn’t the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses. . . . Eighty-seven percent of the DNS lookups involved the two Alfa Bank servers. ‘It’s pretty clear that it’s not an open mail server,’ Camp told me. ‘These organizations are communicating in a way designed to block other people out.’ . . . .”
Paul Vixie–one of the premier experts in the field–felt the connection was highly unusual: ” . . . . Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, ‘The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.’ Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. . . .”
The available evidence indicates that the hookup indicated “human-level communication”: ” . . . I put the question of what kind of activity the logs recorded to the University of California’s Nicholas Weaver, another computer scientist not involved in compiling the logs. ‘I can’t attest to the logs themselves,’ he told me, ‘but assuming they are legitimate they do indicate effectively human-level communication.’ . . . ”
More about the nature of the communication, from the scientist using the code-name “Tea Leaves”: ” . . . . Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. ‘At election-related moments, the traffic peaked,’ according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions. . . .”
The scientists attempted to get the public to pay attention to their investigation and New York Times writers turned their attention to the case: ” . . . In September, the scientists tried to get the public to pay attention to their data. One of them posted a link to the logs in a Reddit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story.* (They are still pursuing it.) Lichtblau met with a Washington representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump. . . .”
Things got “interesting” after that. According to the computer scientists, the Trump Organization shut down the server! As the brilliant Berkeley researcher Peter Dale Scott noted, in a different context, “The cover-up obviates the conspiracy. ” . . . . In September, the scientists tried to get the public to pay attention to their data. One of them posted a link to the logs in a Reddit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story.* (They are still pursuing it.) Lichtblau met with a Washington representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump. . . . The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was ‘very sloppily removed.’ Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like ‘the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.’. . . . Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. ‘That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],’ Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. ‘If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,’ Vixie says. ‘The only look-ups came from this particular source.’According to Vixie and others, the new host name may have represented an attempt to establish a new channel of communication. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank, which suggested that their communications were being monitored, may have deterred the parties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the servers stopped cold. . . .”
Not surprisingly, the FBI has dismissed the relevance of the computer link.
This dismissal comes against the background of several late-breaking developments:
The unsuccessful attempt by Alfa subsidiary Crown Resources to buy Marc Rich’s commodities firm: ” . . . A deal to sell the Swiss-based commodities operation of former U.S. fugitive financier Marc Rich to Russia-owned energy trading group Crown Resources is off. . . . Crown is owned by the Alfa Group conglomerate. . . . .”
The subsequent successful attempt by Alfa player Mikhail Fridman to purchase the Marc Rich firm: ” . . . Mikhail Fridman: ‘Defendant Mikhail Fridman currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of co-conspirator Alfa Bank and as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Defendant Consortium Alfa Group. Fridman further served on the Board of VimpelCom, a NYSE company, and has control over Golden Telecom, a NASDAQ company … purchased the United States trading firm owned by American, Mark Rich, the one time commodities baron pardoned by President Clinton with much controversy. . . .”
The FBI’s long-dormant Twitter account began tweeting files about Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, shortly after the official dismissal of investigations into the Alfa/Trump link: ” . . . . Now, a new interagency mystery is raising questions about whether the F.B.I. has become politicized, just days before the presidential election. On Sunday, a long-dormant F.B.I. Twitter account suddenly sprung to life, blasting out a series of links to case files that cast the Clintons in a decidedly negative light. . . . Then, on Tuesday, the “FBI Records Vault” account—which had not tweeted at all between October 2015 and Sunday—published a link to records related to the 15-year-old, long-closed investigation into former President Bill Clinton’s pardoning of onetime commodities trader turned fugitive Marc Rich. The post, which was quickly retweeted thousands of times, links to a heavily redacted document that repeatedly references the agency’s “Public Corruption” unit—less-than-ideal optics for Hillary Clinton, who has spent her entire campaign fighting her image as a corrupt politician. . . .”
FBI Director James Comey was in charge of the original Marc Rich investigation and the pardon of Rich by Bill Clinton. Is there a connection between the official dismissal of the investigation into the Alfa/Trump link by the FBI, the tweeting by the FBI of the files on the Clinton pardon of Marc Rich and the fact that it was Comey who presided over the Marc Rich investigations? ” . . . . In 2002, Comey, then a federal prosecutor, took over an investigation into President Bill Clinton’s 2001 pardon of financier Marc Rich, who had been indicted on a laundry list of charges before fleeing the country. The decision set off a political firestorm focused on accusations that Rich’s ex-wife Denise made donations to the Democratic Party, the Clinton Library and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign as part of a plan to get Rich off the hook. Comey ultimately decided not to pursue the case. The kicker: Comey himself had overseen Rich’s prosecution between 1987 and 1993. . . .”
Program Highlights Include: details of the Carl Duisberg Society’s links to Atta and to major German corporations; discussion of the Alfa Fellowhip against the background of German Ostpolitik discussed in FTR #’s 918 and 919; detailed analysis of Viktor Kozeny associates Fridman and (Pyotr) Aven (Kozeny employed Bohringer as a pilot); a summary analysis of the major points in FTR #’s 530 and 573.
Al-Qaeda linked jihadists continue to dominate the so-called “moderate” opposition in Syria. The U.S. and Western tactic of using Muslim Brotherhood-linked combatants as proxy warriors and armed heralds of corporatist economics began well before the 9/11 attacks and has continued apace ever since. Failure to pursue the Operation Green Quest investigation looms ever larger.
Bringing up to date topics covered in previous programs and posts, this broadcast begins with further coverage of the development of UFOs–so-called “flying saucers.” They were observed at the Roswell and Area 51 military bases and described as having been developed by the CIA, not “space aliens.”
In numerous posts and programs, we have noted that the GOP/Underground Reich element of U.S. intelligence has used Muslim Brotherhood-derived jihadis as proxy warriors and armed heralds of corporatist economics. In that context, we highlight the frankly suspicious release of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s immigration file–only 206 of 651 pages were released in their entirety.
The use of Islamists as proxy warriors also bears consideration in light of law enforcement’s casual attitude toward 17 Muslim men who fired “hundreds of shots” and were “chanting” in the early morning hours in a park in San Bernardino County in California. Why wasn’t the FBI more concerned?
With tensions rising in the Western Pacific between the U.S. and China, newly-elected Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte harbors deep resentment of the U.S. over the extraction of a self-proclaimed CIA agent who incurred criminal charges in Mindanao while apparently looking for Golden Lily loot in the Islands.
After detailing yet another “suicide” of a key executive of Swiss Re, we present a significant analysis of the recent replacement of the head of the Israeli Defense Force with Avigdor Lieberman, the head of a far-right wing Israeli political party: “Israel has been ‘infected by the seeds of fascism,’ he [former Prime Minister Ehud Barak] said.”
Program Highlights Include: The CIA’s use of Gerhard von Mende, Nazi Germany’s top official coordinating Islamist forces working for the Third Reich; The Carl Duisberg Society’s sponsorship of Mohamed Atta associate and Chechen jihadi Mohamedou Ould Slahi.
Keyed by the victory of a Crimean Tatar singer in the Eurovision song contest–she sang about their deportation by Stalin in 1944–the Crimean Tatars are in the political spotlight again.
Agitating and conspiring alongside OUN/B fascist heirs Pravy Sektor in Ukraine, the Crimean Tatars have become something of a cause celebre in the course of collaborating to destabilize Crimea and Russia. What has been eclipsed by the current controversy is the long history of Crimean Tatar collaboration with the Third Reich, initially, and then Western intelligence.
Utilized as a wedge against the former Soviet Union, the Crimean Tatars were enlisted in the anti-Soviet Promethean League in the period between the two world wars and subsequently turned to the Third Reich as sponsors and allies, seeing the Nazi armies as their ticket to autonomy. Throughout this almost century-long odyssey, the Crimean Tatars have served alongside the Ukrainian fascists of the OUN/B and its successor organizations. ” . . . Berlin began forging plans for winning over Soviet linguistic minorities (‘Volksgruppen’) to collaborate with the Nazis in the war against Moscow. The attention of strategists in the German Foreign Ministry and in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories fell on the approx. 200,000 Crimean Tatars. The idea was encouraged by the hope that, with the Tatar’s help, officially neutral Turkey could also be won over to enter the war. Ankara saw itself as the protective power for Turkic-speaking minorities, including the Tatar linguistic group on the Crimean Peninsula. . . . The Battle Group D began immediately to recruit Crimean Tatar volunteers for the war against the Soviet Union. In December 1941, this battle group had massacred more than 13,000 people – 11,000 Jews and over 800 Roma – in Simferopol (Crimea). . . .”
Following military defeat in the Second World War, the Crimean Tatars and their primary sponsor in the Ostministerium–Gerhard von Mende–continued their work apace under the auspices of Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles’s CIA and the Gehlen organization, both in its CIA incarnation and after it’s incorporation as the BND, the intelligence service of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Crimean Tatar/Ukrainian fascist collaboration has continued into the post-Maidan period.
Program Highlights Include: Review of Crimean Tatar/Pravy Sektor blockading of road traffic into Crimea; review of Crimean Tatar/Pravy Sektor collaboration in the sabotage of Crimea’s electric grid; contemporary German political liaison with dissident Crimean Tatars; Turkey’s ongoing support for the Crimean Tatars, part of Erdogan’s “neo-Ottoman”/Pan-Turkic policy; von Mende’s use of Third Reich collaborator Edige Kirimal during the Cold War; review of the UNA-UNSO’s collaboration with Chechens and other Caucasian Islamists following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
As Americans process the Orlando nightclub shooting, we highlight the Brussels attacks by ISIS devotees. Against the background of deep and longstanding Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of Belgian and European civil society and political infrastructure, we once again underscore that elements of Western intelligence, including elements of CIA, continue to use jihadist groups as proxy warriors and armed heralds of corporate economics.
In addition to the Caucasus, where Chechen jihadis have emigrated to Iraq and Syria and have formed a major foundational element of ISIS, Syria has been a major theater of operations for U.S., Saudi, Turkish and Qatari-backed Islamist fighters. Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the Brussels attacks is the fact that the assaults appear to have been a “plan B,” put into effect when other plans to attack Belgian nuclear facilities fell through. Belgian nuclear facilities are poorly secured and have been infiltrated by ISIS-linked individuals.
In addition to video footage surveilling personnel from Belgian nuclear facilities, a security guard at one of them was found murdered and his security badge had been stolen. This comes as King Abdullah of Jordan has charged that Turkey is deliberately sending ISIS fighters to Europe, where their actions have precipitated the kid-glove treatment the EU has afforded Erdogan and his burgeoning Islamic fascist government’s suppression of journalistic and political freedom.
In Syria, the U.S. refrained from bombing ISIS fighters when they were engaging Assad’s troops and has continued to back a variety of jihadi groups, including the Al-Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front. Tellingly, it was not until the U.S. began bombing ISIS at all that the group’s fighters in Europe began launching terrorist attacks, apparently feeling betrayed by their “allies.”
Program Highlights Include: Turkey’s alleged backing of Islamists in Libya and Somalia; support for ISIS expressed by Haikan Fidan, the chief of Turkish intelligence; the presence in the Syrian conflict of Hassem Batahet, the most important Belgian Muslim Brother; U.S. support for a constellation of jihadist groups in Syria. ” . . . Similarly, the U.S. resisted classifying a Salafist army known as Ahrar al-Sham as terrorist even though it collaborates closely with Al Nusra and its ideology is virtually identical, as Stephen Gowans recently noted at the Global Research website. . . . The same goes for a Free Syrian Army unit known as the 13th Division, which the US has long backed even though it maintains “a tacit collaboration with Nusra” according to The Wall Street Journal “and even shared with the group some of its ammunition supplies. . . . Mohammad Alloush, who enjoys strong US backing as the chief rebel negotiator at the Geneva peace talks, is a leader of yet another Salafist group called Jaysh al-Islam, which issued a blood-curdling call to exterminate Syria’s Alawite community in July 2013. . . . But while one might think this would place Jaysh al-Islam beyond the pale, former Ambassador to Syria Robert S. Ford praised it a year later as one of the “moderate” rebel forces that were making life “particularly painful” for the Damascus government. . . .”
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