The Covert Origins of ISIS

[conniption]

Well darn me anyway... somehow missed this thread, slad, when I started this one (How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS) .

Should have known it. You're always two steps ahead of me.

~

truthdig

Why the U.S. Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster

Posted on Oct 8, 2015

By Gareth Porter


An Islamic State militant waves his group’s flag as he and another celebrate in Fallujah, Iraq. (AP)

Pundits and politicians are already looking for a convenient explanation for the twin Middle East disasters of the rise of Islamic State and the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria. The genuine answer is politically unpalatable, because the primary cause of both calamities is U.S. war and covert operations in the Middle East, followed by the abdication of U.S. power and responsibility for Syria policy to Saudi Arabia and other Sunni allies.

The emergence of a new state always involves a complex of factors. But over the past three decades, U.S. covert operations and war have entered repeatedly and powerfully into the chain of causality leading to Islamic State’s present position.

The causal chain begins with the role of the U.S. in creating a mujahedeen force to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden was a key facilitator in training that force in Afghanistan. Without that reckless U.S. policy, the blowback of the later creation of al-Qaida would very likely not have occurred. But it was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that made al-Qaida a significant political-military force for the first time. The war drew Islamists to Iraq from all over the Middle East, and their war of terrorism against Iraqi Shiites was a precursor to the sectarian wars to follow.

The actual creation of Islamic State is also directly linked to the Iraq War. The former U.S. commander at Camp Bucca in Iraq has acknowledged that the detention of 24,000 prisoners, including hard-core al-Qaida cadres, Baathist officers and innocent civilians, created a “pressure cooker for extremism.” It was during their confinement in that camp during the U.S. troop surge in Iraq 2007 and 2008 that nine senior al-Qaida military cadres planned the details of how they would create Islamic State.

The Obama administration completed the causal chain by giving the green light to a major war in Syria waged by well-armed and well-trained foreign jihadists. Although the Assad regime undoubtedly responded to the firebombing of the Baath Party headquarters in Daraa in mid-March 2011 with excessive force, an armed struggle against the regime began almost immediately. In late March or early April, a well-planned ambush of Syrian troops killed at least two dozen soldiers near the same city. Other killings of troops took place in April in other cities, including Daraa, where 19 soldiers were gunned down.

During the second half of 2011 and through 2012, thousands of foreign jihadists streamed into Syria. As early as November 2011, al-Qaida was playing a central role in the war, carrying out spectacular suicide bombings in Damascus and Aleppo. Obama should have reacted to the first indications of that development and insisted that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar keep external arms and military personnel and funding out of Syria in order to allow a process of peaceful change to take place. Instead, however, the administration became an integral part of a proxy war for regime change.

Seymour Hersh reported last year that an unpublished addendum to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi revealed a covert CIA operation to arm Syrian rebels, in cooperation with Sunni allies’ intelligence services. In early 2012, Hersh reported, following an agreement with Turkey, then-CIA Director David Petraeus approved an elaborate covert operation in which Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar would fund the shipment of weapons to Syrian rebels from stocks captured from the Gadhafi government. The scheme employed front companies set up in Libya to manage the shipments of arms in order to separate the U.S. government from the operation. An October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report released by the Department of Defense to Judicial Watch confirmed the shipments of Libyan weapons from the port of Benghazi to two Syrian ports near Turkey beginning in October 2011 and continuing through August 2012.

A larger covert program involved a joint military operations center in Istanbul, where CIA officers worked with Turkish, Saudi and Qatari intelligence agencies that were also providing arms to their favorite Syrian rebels groups, according to sources who talked with The Washington Post’s David Ignatius.

By November 2012, al-Qaida’s Syrian franchise, al-Nusra Front, had 6,000 to 10,000 troops—mostly foreign fighters—under its command and was regarded as the most disciplined and effective fighting force in the field. The CIA’s Gulf allies armed brigades that had allied themselves with al-Nusra—or were ready to do so. A Qatari intelligence officer is said to have declared, “I will send weapons to al-Qaeda if it will help” topple Assad.

(Page 2)

The CIA officials overseeing the covert operation knew very well what their Sunni allies were doing. After the U.S. shipments from Benghazi stopped in September 2012 because of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post there, a CIA analysis reminded President Obama that the covert operation in Afghanistan had ended up creating a Frankenstein monster. Even the now-famous account in Hillary Clinton’s 2014 memoirs about Obama rejecting a proposal in late 2012 from CIA Director Petraeus for arming and training Syrian rebels does not hide the fact that everyone was well aware of the danger that arms sent to “moderates” would end up in the hands of terrorists.

Despite this, after rejecting Petraeus’ plan in 2012, Obama approved the covert training of “moderate” Syrian rebels in April 2013. As the Pentagon has been forced to acknowledge in recent weeks, that program has been a complete fiasco, as the units either joined al-Nusra or were attacked by al-Nusra. Meanwhile, as Vice President Joe Biden pointed out in October 2014, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were pouring “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons” into Syria that were ending up in the hands of the jihadists.

Unfortunately, Biden’s complaint came two and a half years too late. By October 2014, more than 15,000 foreign fighters, including 2,000 Westerners, were estimated to have gone to Syria. Islamic State and al-Nusra Front emerged as the two major contenders for power in Syria once Assad is overthrown, and the Saudis and Qataris were now ready to place their bets on al-Nusra. In early 2015, after King Salman inherited the Saudi throne, the three Sunni states began focusing their support on al-Nusra and its military allies, encouraging them to form a new military command, the “Army of Conquest.” The al-Nusra-led front then captured Idlib province in March.

Obama, focusing on the Iran nuclear agreement, has given no indication that he is troubled by his allies’ approach. If the Bush administration destabilized Iraq in order to increase U.S. military presence and power in the Middle East, the Obama administration has countenanced a proxy war that has destabilized and Syria because of his primary concern with consolidating the U.S. alliances with the Saudis and the other Sunni regimes.

Although it has been almost a rigid rule that pundits must ascribe U.S. fealty to its Saudi alliance to oil interests, oil is far from the top of the list of U.S interests today. More important to our national security state is the interest of the Pentagon and the military services to protect the military bases they have in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE. Their need to preserve those alliance relationships is intensified by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) cornucopia of military contracts for U.S. arms manufacturers that assures enormous profits will continue to flow for the foreseeable future. One estimate of the total at stake for the Pentagon and its private allies in military relationships with the GCC is $100 billion to $150 billion over two decades.

Those are crucial bureaucratic and business stakes for the U.S. national security state, which is usually driven by the bottom lines associated with different courses of action. Especially given the administration’s lack of a coherent geopolitical perspective on the region, the security state’s interests offer a persuasive explanation for Obama’s effectively farming out the most important element of its Syria policy to regional allies, with disastrous results.
_______

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

[seemslikeadream]

Media Blacks Out Pentagon Report Exposing U.S. Role In ISIS Creation
The report proved that the growth and expansion of ISIS was a direct result of arms being sent by the U.S. to anti-Assad Islamists, with the strategic U.S. intention of toppling the Assad regime in Syria.
By Jay Syrmopoulos for the Free Thought Project @SirMetropolis | June 3, 2015

In a story reverberating across the world, last week award winning journalist and scholar Dr. Nafeez Ahmed exposed startling information about U.S. complicity in the creation and rise of ISIS, as contained in a recently declassified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report.


Possibly more terrifying than the report itself may be the fact that this information has been virtually blacked out across global mainstream media.

This silence speaks volumes as to the weight of this information. It illustrates the complicity of the English-speaking media, in collusion with government, to keep people ignorant of the harsh realities of U.S. style realpolitik.


The stunning report, dated August 2012, proved that the growth and expansion of ISIS was a direct result of arms being sent by the U.S. to anti-Assad Islamists, with the strategic U.S. intention of toppling the Assad regime in Syria.

The report stated, “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” comprise “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq],” showing explicitly what elements were providing the true velocity of the insurgency.

Although the U.S. has held to the official line that only moderate rebels are being armed in Syria, figures such as Presidential candidate Rand Paul stating that “war hawks” in congress were responsible for the rise of ISIS, to Vice President Joe Biden stating (start at 1:30:00), that there were no “moderate rebels,” say otherwise.

“The secret Pentagon document provides extraordinary confirmation that the US-led coalition currently fighting ISIS, had three years ago welcomed the emergence of an extremist ‘Salafist Principality’ in the region as a way to undermine Assad,” Ahmed said.

In an interview with Josh Cook of Truth In Media, Ahmed stated:

“I spoke to a major national newspaper here in the U.K. and what was interesting was they were quite sympathetic to the line of inquiry, but just felt like they couldn’t cover it. And it wasn’t that they were told they couldn’t cover it. The journalist that I spoke to who is a senior journalist that I have a lot of respect for was very sympathetic to what I was saying. He literally said to me look – I actually could sense that there was this fear that I shouldn’t be talking about this, this is going to far – is the document really strong enough? He didn’t feel confident.

“There is almost like an unspoken recognition I think in the mainstream media that there are certain things we are not allowed to say. The idea that something as despicable as ISIS could actually been foreseen or facilitated deliberately, which is really what is implied by this report quite clearly.

“It’s almost too much,” he said. “It goes against the grain of so much we take for granted. So many assumptions about not just American, but Western kind of supremacy and the benevolence of our government that we would never do anything like this … it’s a big kind of leap.

“On the one hand I think that journalists are scared and worried about pushing boundaries to that extent. It does raise a concern that there is an absolute silence on this issue, especially in the English speaking media. It raises real questions about what is behind that silence?”

People have a right to be informed about the undertakings of a government operating in their name and the press has a duty to expose that which is intentionally obscured from the view of the public by those in power.

When the press is afraid or complicit in hiding these facts from the American public, then we, as a nation, are in a much greater danger than anything ISIS presents.

Please share this story to help get this vital information out to as many people as possible, as people deserve to know what actions their governments undertake in their name!

Check out the full interview with Dr. Nafeez Ahmed below:

[zangtang]

who's up for a 100 billion dollar class action lawsuit ?

[stillrobertpaulsen]

I never seriously considered the possibility of ISIS being part of a mind control op, but I recently had this brought to my attention. Camp Bucca has been portrayed in the media as a place where a "pressure cooker" of Islamic extremists just blew. I think this interpretation is just another example of "blowback" being bullshit. I'm not sure if the author of this piece understands that, but that's what I'm reading between the lines of his research, whose links are embedded in the post link.

What is the truth about ISIS?
Posted on September 3, 2014 by therearenosunglasses


A detainee appears before the Multinational Forces Review Committee. This is one of Camp Bucca’s programs that help detainees to reintegrate into Iraqi society. (Department of Defense photo/Pfc. Amie J. McMillan)


An instructor provides a mathematical lesson to detainees at the theater internment facility in Camp Bucca, Iraq. The class is part of the educational opportunities available to the detainees to help them get a better job and serve as an example for their community upon their release. (Department of Defense photo/Pfc. Amie J. McMillan)

What is the truth about ISIS?

Is it an ISIS/ISIS a pseudo-gang, working for the CIA, or is it merely a bi-product of the US/Saudi strategic union? There has not yet been another serious explanation put forth, other than this, to explain their meteoric rise to sudden terror stardom in 2014, when they were “being kept on life support” in mid-2012. Despite the non-serious explanations offered by some serious mis-informers to the contrary (State Dept, Al-Arabiya), “bank robberies, extortion and kidnapping” do not explain the sudden mobility, or capability to mount continual operations, by a small army of thousands of men, with an apparently limitless supply of modern weaponry, spread-out over 2-1/2 states (still working on Lebanon). Such an army could NOT exist without a state sponsor.

In trying to use the Internet as primary (only) source, we first learn that there are many questions that are nearly impossible to answer effectively there, because of the constant “scrubbing” (deleting) of information that is embarrassing to the owner of the Internet (USA), or to its minions. It is not even necessary to delete articles there to hide them, a simple extra space or extra letter in the title link will nullify all further links made back to the article of embarrassment.

In addition, researchers must rely upon Google Translate to unlock all articles in the foreign press, effectively turning most translations into gibberish. For an English researcher wanting to locate specific articles in Arabic, or other tongues, there is also that annoying foreigner habit of adding their own letters to words (words with multiple spellings), thus making a nearly impossible task even harder.

Nonetheless, I continue to pursue the origins of the “Islamic State” or the history of its leaders, looking for the smoking guns to tie the movable “false flag” to its state benefactors. From the evidence that still remains on the Web, I soon discovered that the ISIL leadership (photos and history below) has links to Iraqi internment Camp Bucca…but, this is a story with many holes.

By my own “guesstimate,” ISIS is the result of a failed US Army behavioral modification program at Camp Bucca, Umm Qasr, Iraq, between 2007 and its closure in 2009.

If it is true that alleged ISIS leader “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” was ever in Camp Bucca then he went through the Camp 134 Process, subjecting him to a “behavior modification” process, part of a “proactive counterinsurgency strategy” for detention operations (according to Detention Operations, Behavior Modification, and Counterinsurgency, from the US ARMY COMBINED ARMS CENTER). If al-Baghdadi or other ISIS members were at Bucca, they were herded through a dividing process, which identified the “unreconcilable” insurgents, in order to sequester them away from the general population. “Moderates or former extremists moving toward moderation” were separated for special treatment intended turn them away from extremist beliefs, before “releas[ing] them to return to their homes as “moderate missiles of the mind.” The mission at Bucca was to “modify the behavior of detainees so that when they reenter Iraqi society, they are no longer threats to the Iraqi government and coalition forces but
rather agents of change for the future of Iraq.”

Before pursuing the question of the truth about ISIS, we must ask whether this behavior modification process successful, or did it have an unanticipated opposite result? It seems pretty obvious from our perspective that graduates of the ISIS program went on to become the world’s most notorious terrorist army, a grave threat to world peace? Was this the result of a failed overt detainee/prisoner strategy, or was this the intended result? Was the US Army training terrorists at Bucca, or did its proactive counterinsurgency strategy for detention operations” to turn the prison system into “a legitimate
arena for counterinsurgency actions“ backfire miserably, producing a generation of terrorist-jihadis like the world has never seen?

Consider what follows to be “hole-filler” in that storyline, hopefully helping readers to link the terrorists back to their state sponsors.





ISIS: Who is former Imam Abu Omar Al Baghdadi and the top ISIS leaders?

Saudi Al-Arabiya provided the graphic answer below (making the text automatically suspicious). Click on the photo or the Arabiya link to view readable text.–

ISIS leaders
1- Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—-BUCCA
2- Abu Ayman al-Iraqi—-BUCCA
3- Abu Ahmad al-Alwani
4- Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi—-BUCCA
5- Haji Bakr—-BUCCA
6- Abu Fatima al-Jaheishi

What is significant about Camp Bucca?
It was the primary site for an experimental US Army behavioral modification program, Task Force 134, “Detention Operations Process,” which got into detainees home and their lives, as well as reconditioning their heads.

DR AMI M. Angell–rehabilitation programme leader at Camp Bucca.

“I think our efforts were successful. In fact, so successful that three previous Al Qaeda operatives [see confirmation by Dr. Angell] went through all the programs, were released, and then returned to work the programs as civilians.” (1)

“They were guided by a psychiatrist and art instructor nick
named Picasso – once an Al-Qaeda operative and a detainee at Camp Bucca.” (2b)–[“They discussed issues such as violence and Iraq’s future, before expressing their feelings in art.” ]

FURTHER TESTIMONY FROM DR. ANGELL–

“The spare time led some to start radical religious classes so some moderate detainees were converted into extremists. ‘When we came up with rehab programmes as a solution, the American military was very against it,…They didn’t understand why we are spending money on rehab when we are going to leave the country eventually.’–“The Art of Rehabilitating Terrorists” (2)

“The rehab programme won the support of US Marine Major-General Douglas Stone. Initial funding was enough for ‘religious rehabilitation’ for only 30 detainees. She brought in well-respected imams to teach them about the Quran. ‘We saw a thirst for education as the other detainees all wanted to know what the 30 learnt,’ said Dr Angell.–[confirmation comes from former Bucca detainee Adel Jasim Mohammed.via Al Jazeera (below)–ed.] ‘Because many of them were uneducated, those who went for the classes were shocked to learn that what they had thought of Islam was flawed. ‘They didn’t question what people told them and didn’t even understand the reasons for many things, from washing hands and feet before prayers to why they pray.’ (2a)

“They discussed issues such as violence and Iraq’s future, before expressing their feelings in art. They were guided by a psychiatrist and art instructor nick
named Picasso – once an Al-Qaeda operative and a detainee at Camp Bucca.” (2b)



Through Dr. Angell’s program, a “moderate” Imam was brought in to teach religious classes at “Bucca Freedom School.” He was given a list of religiously inclined detainees and allowed to pick 10-12 to mentor closely, with allegedly moderate ideas. Those special students were allowed to hold religion classes for hundreds of students. For all we know, that list of religious trainees formed the basis for the “Islamic State.” Again, intentional, or the biggest “cluster-fuck” of all time?



US Iraq jail an ‘al-Qaeda school’–“Former inmates of Camp Bucca say military prison was training ground for extremism.

Adel Jasim Mohammed, a former detainee of Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr, said that US officials did nothing to stop radicals from indoctrinating young detainees at the camp.

“Extremists had freedom to educate the young detainees. I saw them giving courses using classroom boards on how to use explosives, weapons and how to become suicide bombers,” Mohammed said.

“For the Americans we felt it was normal. They did not stop them [the radicals].”

…In 2005, an extremist was sent to our camp. At first, Sunnis and Shias rejected his teachings. But we were told that he was imposed by the prison authority,” he said.

“He stayed for a week and recruited 25 of the 34 detainees – they became extremists like him.”

Was this visiting scholar of radical Islam the same man who now calls himself Emir of the self-declared “Caliphate”?

Abu Bakr Baghdadi allegedly took the helm of “Al Qaida In Iraq,” after the death of the terrorist leader known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006

The combined real and fake histories of Abu Bakr Baghdadi paint a portrait of an Iraqi from Ramadi in Anbar Province, who was allegedly a scholar of Islam with a master’s degree and a PhD in Islamic studies from University of Islamic Sciences in Baghdad. He was allegedly captured by American forces sometime in 2003, before allegedly being released to the Iraqis in 2004. All articles repeating the claim that Baghdadi was held at Camp Bucca until its closure, can be traced back to this article from The Daily Beast. There is no information to be found on the Internet to fill in the gaps about his his time with the Iraqis, revealing where (or even if) he was held, but we know for certain that the only known photo of the man whom the Western media call “al-Baghdadi” came from the Iraq Min. of Interior. We cannot know for certain that the man held and released by American forces back then is the same man who now calls himself “Caliph Ibrahim.”



How ten months at US run Camp Bucca in 2004 transformed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi into a ruthless foe

“Many of us at Camp Bucca were concerned that instead of just holding detainees, we had created a pressure cooker for extremism.”–James Skylar Gerrond, a former compound commander at Camp Bucca in 2006 and 2007

Critics of the facility say it had in effect become a terror training institute, run by resentful inmates under a strict interpretation of Islamic law.

“It is al-Qa’ida central down there,” said Sheikh Ali Hatem Suleiman, a tribal leader from Anbar province. “What better way to teach everyone how to become fanatical than put them all together for scant reason, then deprive them?”

[SEE: Behind the Scenes: Walking amid 2,000 al Qaeda suspects ]

The Battle Behind the Wire–Rand Corp].

Reform School for Radicals, Marisa L. Porges
July 1, 2011

To varying degrees, these initiatives also include religious education, from one-on-one meetings with local religious leaders who discuss ideological sources of radicalization to group sessions that review the Quran and Islamic law. In Iraq, the “Countering Extremism with Enlightenment”, or Tanweer program, was modeled after early efforts in Saudi Arabia. Clerics and social workers led a religious dialogue to advance moderate views of Islam while promoting civic duties associated with Iraqi democracy.

US risks fanning violence as it opens gates of Iraqi detention camps–April 19, 2009


A former detainee entertains his daughter at being reunited with his family at Camp Cropper in western Baghdad, Aug. 9, 2009. Twenty-one detainees were greeted by their families while being released from the custody of coalition forces at the monthly Lion’s Dawn release ceremony.

On Aug. 19, 2009, a series of massive car-bombs announced the rebirth of AQI–Scores dead as Baghdad rocked by series of massive explosions

Sept. 17, 2009, Camp Bucca Detention Center Closes in Iraq…thousands of inmates are set free in southern Iraq, near the Kuwaiti border.

“An Air Force C-17 carrying the last group of 180 detainees lifted off from the Basra airport headed to Camp Cropper.”
AL-QAIDA IN IRAQ ON THE ROPES

The following is also taken from the July 22, 2008 al‐Qa`ida’s Road In and Out of Iraq. Analysis from West Point expert on Iraq, Dr. Michael Knights–

” AQI is a wounded organization….foreign fighters are now trying to leave the country.”

That was Dr. Knights’ opinion on AQI in July 2008, the following is his assessment on July 31, 2012-–

“The Sunni insurgencies (plural) are being kept on life support.”

“It is clear that AQI has benefited from an unprecedented infusion of trained terrorist manpower. Many of the released persons spent time planning inside detention facilities like Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper, specifically so they could launch a smarter, stronger insurgent effort one day.”

In this testimony by Dr. Knights before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on December 12, 2013 (SEE: The Resurgence of Al-Qaeda in Iraq), he referred to a previous article that he had written on February 24, 2012 for the West Point Center for Combating Terrorism (which has apparently been erased from the Internet, for some reason), called “Back with a vengeance: Al-Qaeda in Iraq rebounds.” This article is cited frequently by researchers who search for the roots of “Islamic State.” It described a spent organization, headed for the great dust bin of history, far different from the supercharged terrorist organization that is tearing across Iraq and Syria, as described in Knights’ August 27, 2014 testimony (SEE: ISIL’s Political-Military Power in Iraq).

The following excerpts come from that erased assessment–

“By the middle of 2010, Al-Qaeda in Iraq was dead on its feet. The organization suffered critical setbacks in late 2006 and early 2007 as Sunni Arab tribal militias – the Sahwa (Awakening) – turned against Al-Qaeda. In parallel the U.S.-led military effort protected the Sahwa and executed high-tempo remorseless counter-terrorism operations that ripped Al-Qaeda in Iraq to pieces. The group’s foreign volunteers and money started to dry up. Al-Qaeda cells began to process of disintegrating into local criminal franchises that now kidnapped and extorted to pay their salaries rather than fund insurgency. In April 2010 Al-Qaeda in Iraq lost its two most senior leaders – AQI emir Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and war minister Abu Ayyub al-Masri – and stood in the verge of “disintegration” according to the US commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno. In a press conference on June 4, 2010, Odierno noted: “Over the last 90 days or so, we’ve either picked up or killed 34 out of the top 42 Al-Qaeda in Iraq leaders.”

“By early 2012 it was clear that the deaths of AQI’s senior leaders were a watershed event that unfolded just as the movement sought to find a new way to operate in Iraq. Numerous processes have unfolded since Al-Qaeda’s defeat in 2006-2009, including the release of large numbers of experienced militants from U.S. detention facilities, changes in the balance of foreign and Iraqi fighters within the movement, the withdrawal of U.S. forces, and determined attempts by Al-Qaeda in Iraq to learn from its mistakes. These changes crystallized in the year after the deaths of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri, culminating in a successful re-launch of the movement in April 2011 and a significant recovery of operational space within Iraq’s Sunni Arab communities. The movement appears to have rationalized its near-term objectives and synchronized its propaganda with the mounting concerns of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs.”
THE SAUDI CONNECTION–
Members of the Islamic State of Iraq terrorist group and the Levant (EIIL) affiliated to Al-Qaeda, captured in Iraq, confessed to having direct links with the government of Saudi Arabia.

ABDULLAH AZZAM BRIGADES


Majid al-Majid was Saudi chief of the Ab.Azzam Brigades in Lebanon until his arrest and death in custody of Lebanon’s Army.
“Funding for the Sunni insurgency comes from private individuals within
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.”–Iraq Study Group Report

al‐Qa`ida’s Road In and Out of Iraq,

“Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt were the source of most of the foreign fighters detained in Camp Bucca, Iraq….As of April 7, 2008, the United States was holding 251 foreign fighters at Camp Bucca, Iraq. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria each contributed 19 percent of those fighters. Libyans comprise only 3 percent.”
“Foreign Fighters contributed approximately 75 Percent of suicide bombers between August 2006 and August 2007.”
“The plurality of suicide bombers entering Iraq between August 2006 and August 2007 were Saudi.“]

“Sheikh Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi” was installed as head of Mujahideen Shura Council, the precursor of “Islamic State” in January of 2006. Was this the same man as Abu Bakr Baghdadi, even though he was supposedly incarcerated at Bucca at the time? Abdullah Azzam Brigades was spun-off from AQI in the process. A precursor to Al Nusra Front, “Al Nusra wal Jihad fi Bilad al Sham” split-off from AbAzzam in 2005, taking initial credit for the assassination of Rafik Hariri.

Lebanese officials say Beirut suicide bomber, his accomplice are Saudi citizens

Atrash Investigation: Two Saudi Suicide Bombers on the Loose

CONCLUSION–

Why is it that no researchers have asked the question “How did AQI suddenly acquire enough money and equipment to turn a failing terrorist entity into an “Islamic Caliphate” overnight?” Even if they did bully the Free Syrian Army and take their weapons,pull-off a “string of bank robberies,” kidnappings and extortion, AQI could never have come up with enough cash to run an army, or to buy a fleet of shiny new Toyota trucks, or to become one of the best-paying employers in the Middle East, without being on some state’s payroll.

peter.chamberlin@hotmail.com

Looking to see if there was any other site pondering the possibility of Camp Bucca being part of a neo-MK ULTRA operation, I found this:

Who is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?

The largely unknown leader of the Takfiri terrorist group ISIL has declared himself “caliph” of Islam and rightful ruler of the world’s nearly two billion Muslims.

Al-Baghdadi’s declaration was met with a barrage of ridicule. Observers pointed out that al-Baghdadi declared himself Caliph while wearing a Rolex wristwatch – a symbol of enslavement to Western materialist consumer culture.

Muslim scholarly authorities – even those deluded enough to support the “Syrian rebels” – have unanimously repudiated Baghdadi’s bogus caliphate. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the best-known pro-Syrian-rebels TV scholar, dismissively rejected Baghdadi’s claim. Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s Al-Nahda Party, called Baghdadi’s self-promotion “reckless,” “deceptive,” and “ridiculous.” The most important group working to restore the caliphate, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, said Baghdadi’s proclamation distorted the reality of what a caliphate is supposed to be.

Even Assem Barqawi, the spokesperson for the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front – an erstwhile ally of ISIL in the Syrian war – spurned al-Baghdadi’s claim, and ripped ISIL for its brutality.

In short, al-Baghdadi and ISIL have no support whatsoever among Muslims. They are loathed even by their fellow ultra-Salafis, Wahhabis and Takfiris.

Yet the self-proclaimed “caliph” and his roughly 2000 ISIL followers have been relentlessly promoted by the Zionist-dominated Western media and terror-industry think tanks. For example, terror expert William McCants of the Brookings Institution told the New York Times: “ISIS is now officially the biggest and baddest global jihadi group on the planet… Nothing says ‘hard-core’ like being cast out by Al Qaeda.”

A naive, angry young Muslim who saw this in the New York Times might get the idea that ISIL is cool. That’s exactly what the Zionist New York Times and the Zionist Brookings Institution want.

Zionist propagandist Sheldon Filger – who treasonously shilled for Israeli citizen Stanley Fischer’s appointment as head of the American Federal Reserve – is also shilling for al-Baghdadi. Filger writes:

“The lessons of history itself should compel us to take Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's promise to wage a ferocious worldwide war of vengeance against those he sees as the enemies of God with the utmost seriousness. His sermon in Mosul may very well mark the opening shots of the Third World War...”

Worse yet, al-Baghdadi and ISIL are not just being hyped – they are also being armed, trained, and dressed in identical black Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles uniforms. The money is coming from US taxpayers, CIA drug-money slush funds, and CIA-asset Persian Gulf oil sheikhs.

Why are the CIA and the Zionists supporting ISIL and promoting al-Baghdadi’s fake caliphate? And why does Israel provide support and medical treatment to ISIL terrorists in Syria?

This paradoxical situation – a self-proclaimed “caliph of Islam” who has no support among Muslims, but massive support from Zionists and imperialists – points to an ineluctable conclusion: ISIL is a manufactured fake-opposition group.

So who manufactured ISIL – and how?

Circumstantial evidence suggests that al-Baghdadi may have been mind-controlled while held prisoner by the US military in Iraq. The American and Zionist authorities are scrambling to hide the fact that al-Baghdadi spent more than five years in US custody. Why would they engage in such a cover-up unless they had something big to hide?

Wikipedia, a tool of the Zionist wing of the CIA, is peddling the following falsehood:

“According to US Department of Defense records, al-Baghdadi was held at Camp Bucca as a ‘civilian internee’ by US Forces-Iraq from early February 2004 until early December 2004, when he was released. A Combined Review and Release Board recommended an ‘unconditional release’ of al-Baghdadi and there is no record of him being held at any other time.”

This may not be an outright lie. There may indeed be “no record” of the fact that al-Baghdadi was held and treated by a secret CIA mind-control unit at Camp Bucca from 2004 until 2009. The records of such a “fabricate a fake ‘radical Muslim’ leader through mind control” operation would undoubtedly be destroyed or concealed behind a high-level National Security classification.

But is such a thing really possible? Sadly, yes. CIA mind control technology has made tremendous strides since it began in the 1950s with the lavishly-funded MK Ultra program. MK Ultra was closed around 1960 because it had achieved its objective: Power over the human mind such that a brainwashed “Manchurian candidate” assassin could be created. That is, an ordinary human being, after CIA treatment, could be made to kill someone – anyone – without the slightest conscious awareness of his actions. The most notorious “Manchurian candidate” is Sirhan Sirhan, the mind-control slave who was set up as a patsy in the CIA’s murder of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.

The CIA also has a track record of creating cults – and their charismatic leaders. The Reverend Jim Jones, an anti-establishment clergyman, was turned by CIA mind-control into a fire-breathing, charismatic puppet-master, who convinced hundreds of people to join him in a mass suicide. Ironically, the puppet-master was himself a CIA puppet; the mass suicide was a CIA experiment designed to discover whether a large group of political dissidents could be so totally controlled that they would kill themselves on command. This experiment, like the murder of RFK, was a success.

More recently, the CIA has been conducting Nazi-style mind-control experiments on Muslim inmates in Guantanamo and other terror prisons. Jon Ronson – a mainstream journalist and bestselling author who generally keeps his humorous distance from “conspiracy theories” – discovered in 2003 that Guantanamo inmate Jamal al-Harith and others had been subjected to torture and “silent sound” mind-control experiments while in US custody.

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein shows that CIA torture is not designed to elicit information. Its real purpose is to “break” the subject so he or she can be mind-controlled.

Douglas Rushkoff’s book Coercion explains how CIA mind control works: The subject is “broken,” then the CIA interrogator presents himself as a substitute parent figure and seizes total control of the subject’s mind. That is how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, was convinced by his mind-control torturers that he was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

The secrecy surrounding al-Baghdadi’s five years in US custody strongly suggests that the self-proclaimed “caliph of Islam” is actually a Muslim version of Jim Jones. His “Islamic State” is a Muslim Jonestown. It is designed to mass-suicide Islam by turning Muslims against each other.

Fortunately, the world’s Muslims are not drinking the kool aid.

[seemslikeadream]

Was Iraq's Top Terrorist Radicalized at a US-Run Prison?
A former US military compound commander at Camp Bucca suspects ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's extremism was fostered (or bolstered) at the facility.
—By Jenna McLaughlin | Fri Jul. 11, 2014 5:00 AM EDT

Email
279
Dusan Vranic/AP
In early July, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of the jihadist terror group now known as the Islamic State—formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS—preached on high in Mosul and declared himself the "Caliph Ibrahim" of a new fundamentalist Sunni state stretching from western and northern Iraq to northern Syria. This announcement came after months of fighting over territory and skirmishes with Iraqi forces, as ISIS invaded and captured dozens of Iraqi cities including Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown.

In short order, Baghdadi has become Iraq's most prominent extremist leader. But for much of his adult life, Baghdadi did not have a reputations as a fiery, jihadist trailblazer. According to the Telegraph, members of his local mosque in Tobchi (a neighborhood in Baghdad) who knew him from around 1989 until 2004 (when he was between the ages of 18 and 33) considered Baghdadi a quiet, studious fellow and a talented soccer player. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Baghdadi was earning a degree in Islamic studies in Baghdad.

But within a couple years of the US invasion, Baghdadi was a prisoner in Camp Bucca, the US-run detainment facility in Umm Qasr, Iraq. And a US compound commander stationed at that prison—and other military officials—have in recent weeks wondered whether Baghdadi's stint there radicalized him and put him on the path to taking over ISIS in 2010 and guiding the movement to its recent military victories.

The details of Baghdadi's time in Camp Bucca are murky. Some media reports note that he was held as a "civilian internee" at the prison for 10 months in 2004. Others report that he was captured by US forces in 2005 and spent four years at Camp Bucca. The reason why he was apprehended is not publicly known; he could have been arrested on a specific charge or as part of a large sweep of insurgents or insurgent supporters. (A confidential Red Cross report leaked in May 2004 suggested than around 90 percent of detainees of Iraqi origin were arrested "by mistake.") Army Colonel Kenneth King, the commanding US officer at Camp Bucca in 2009, recently told the Daily Beast that he distinctly remembered a man resembling Baghdadi: "He was a bad dude, but he wasn't the worst of the worst." King noted he was "not surprised" that such a radical figure emerged from the facility.

James Skylar Gerrond, a former US Air Force security forces officer and a compound commander at Camp Bucca in 2006 and 2007, says that he believes Baghdadi's stay at the prison contributed to his radicalization—or at least bolstered his extremism. After Baghdadi proclaimed the Islamic State a new nation and himself its leader, Gerrond tweeted, "Many of us at Camp Bucca were concerned that instead of just holding detainees, we had created a pressure cooker for extremism." Gerrond is now a civilian working for the Department of Defense.


"Like many Iraq vets, I've been following the situation with ISIS for the last several weeks and trying to understand why things are falling apart so badly in the region," Gerrond tells Mother Jones in an email. "When some of Baghdadi's personal history started to come out, such as the fact that he was detained at Camp Bucca around the same time I was deployed there, I started to reflect on my deployment and what the conditions were at the facility during that time."

Gerrond notes that US military officials in charge of the prison fretted that prisoners could be radicalized at the facility: "This was something that everyone in the chain of command [for Camp Bucca] (and other detention facilities) were always concerned with." Maj. General Douglas Stone, the deputy commander for detainee operations in 2007, told Newsweek that year that potential radicalization was a "very real concern" at Camp Bucca.

According to Gerrond—and documents released by the US military back him up—the military officials running Camp Bucca took steps to prevent radicalization of inmates and violence at the camp. This included careful segregation and later, specific anti-extremist re-education programs. Prisoners were separated on the basis of ideology, among other factors, in order to prevent the commingling of extremists and moderates. The prisoners who were identified as the "most extreme," including those who associated with radical factions, were isolated.

By quarantining extremists from younger or more moderate detainees, US military officials believed they could keep others from being converted, according to Gerrond. However, he says, it was incredibly difficult at Camp Bucca to regulate and monitor whether or not these efforts were successful. "In theory, this segregation should have kept those with the most heinous and violent ideologies separate from those detainees that were less motivated to commit violence," says Gerrond. Yet efforts to curtail extremism fell short:

There was a huge amount of collective pressure exerted on detainees to become more radical in their beliefs. Obviously, this was supported by the fact that the detainees were being held against their will in a facility with minimal communication with their family and friends. This led to detainees turning to each other for support. If there were radical elements within this support network, there was always the potential that detainees would become more radical in their beliefs.

Gerrond notes the US military instituted several initiatives to counter the spread of extreme beliefs among the prisoners at Camp Bucca. Most preaching, he says, was conducted in public, where it could be monitored, and translators stood by to identify radical rhetoric. The facility also implemented an anti-extremist re-education program that offered various courses, including literacy classes and seminars on reading the Koran that were designed to counter interpretations of the holy book that justified violence. Most of these courses were voluntary and likely only reached a small percentage of detainees. The program, according to US military records, enlisted Islamic clerics, psychologists, and behavioral scientists to work with prisoners.

"I would be surprised if more than 5 to 10 percent of the detainee population participated," says Gerrond. He recalls that the first graduation ceremony for this program was "somewhat surreal…with a round of sincere handshakes and congratulations between American guards and Iraqi detainees." The program also attempted to increase family visitation privileges to provide psychological support to moderates and prevent radicalization. But the camp's location in southeast Iraq, on the border of Kuwait, made it difficult for many families to visit, because of the distance and the danger in traveling.

Former inmates told Al Jazeera in 2009 that Camp Bucca, which closed in September of 2009 and transferred detainees to Iraqi custody, was an "Al Qaeda school," where extremists gave chalkboard lessons on explosives and suicide bombing techniques to younger prisoners. One former prisoner, Adel Jasim Mohammed, told the Arab news service that one extremist "stayed for a week and recruited 25 of the 34 detainees" he was grouped with. Mohammed said that the US military officials did essentially nothing to stop radicals from indoctrinating other detainees, though US military officials denied to Al Jazeera that jihadists had radicalized moderate prisoners there.

The US military investigated the management of the camp and other detention facilities in 2004 and cited serious problems including "inexperienced guards, lapses in accountability, complacency, lack of leadership presence, and lack of clear and concise communication between the guards and the leadership." But this inquiry did not examine whether conditions had fostered extremism.

As sectarian violence flares in Iraq, Gerrond thinks back to a "chilling conversation" he had with a "Shia Iraqi corrections officer" at Camp Bucca. He "stated to me (through a translator) that when the Americans departed Iraq, his only request was that we leave them enough ammunition so that they could kill all the [Sunni] detainees that were being held."

http://www.historycommons.org/searchRes ... &search=Go

April 2003-2004: US Begins Establishing Prisons and Detention Centees in IraqEdit event
The US establishes a loose network of prisons and detention centers in Iraq where Iraqi prisoners of war are held and interrogated. Iraqis detained by Coalition Forces are usually first brought to facilities at US military compounds where they are subjected to initial and secondary interrogations, ranging from a period of one week for initial interrogations up to one month for secondary interrogations. During this period, the detainees are not permitted to contact relatives or seek legal counsel. The prisoners are then sent to one of ten major Coalition prison facilities, at which point their names and information are supposed to be entered into the Coalition’s central database. The major facilities include:
bullet Abu Ghraib Prison (Baghdad Central Correctional Facility or BCCF), the largest.
bullet Camp Bucca, in Umm Qasr.
bullet Talil Air force Base (Whitford Camp), located south of Baghdad.
bullet Al-Rusafa (formerly the Deportations’ Prison or Tasfirat), in Baghdad.
bullet Al-Kadhimiyya, in Baghdad, for women only.
bullet Al-Karkh, in Baghdad, for juveniles only.
bullet Al-Diwaniyya Security Detainee Holding Area.
bullet the Tikrit detention facility.
bullet the Mosul detention facility.
bullet and MEK (Ashraf Camp), near al-Ramadi. [HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, 5/7/2004]
Entity Tags: US Military
Timeline Tags: Torture of US Captives
April 16-22, 2003: Red Cross Sees Prisoner Shot Dead in IraqEdit event
At Camp Bucca, a large detention camp at Umm Qasr near the Kuwaiti border (officially called the Bucca Theater Internment Facility), representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) witness a shooting incident resulting in the death of one prisoner and the wounding of another. [INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS, 2/2004]
Entity Tags: International Committee of the Red Cross
Timeline Tags: Torture of US Captives
(May 2003): Solider Says US Troops Have Killed Iraqi Prisoners in Video DiaryEdit event
In a homemade video journal, an unidentified female US soldier at Camp Bucca prison in Iraq candidly speaks of how she and her colleagues have shot and killed prisoners. “If we shoot any more of the Iraqis, or attack any of them, they’re gonna supposedly come in and attack the camp…. But we’ll believe that when it actually happens, because we’ve already killed another Iraqi just last night when I was working. So I don’t know what’s going on…” She does not describe under what circumstances the shootings had taken place. In another part of the video she admits to antagonizing the captives. “I actually got in trouble the other day because I was throwing rocks at them.” [CBS NEWS, 3/12/2004]
Timeline Tags: Torture of US Captives
May 12, 2003: Four US Soldiers Beat Severely Prisoners at Camp BuccaEdit event
Four soldiers from the 320th Military Police Battalion severely beat prisoners after transporting them to Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. Soldiers spread the legs of some prisoners while others kick them in the groin. One prisoner allegedly has “his face smashed in.” The incident is reported by the MPs of another unit. After the soldiers are charged, one of the soldiers being investigated writes to his relatives to explain the charges: “A few of my MPs were assaulted by the enemy prisoners, and we had to use force to regain control, all justifiable.” [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 7/27/2003; WASHINGTON POST, 5/9/2004] The four MPs of Lt. Col. Jerry L. Phillabaum’s 320th Military Police Battalion will be given less than honorable discharges, but not prosecuted. [US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, 7/9/2004]
Entity Tags: Jerry L. Phillabaum
Timeline Tags: Torture of US Captives
June 29, 2003: Brig. Gen. Karpinski Given Control of Three Prisons in IraqEdit event
Army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski—a reservist with no experience managing prisons—takes over command of the 800th Military Police Brigade, an Army reserve unit from Uniondale in New York State, from Brig. Gen. Paul Hill. She is put in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists. Her office is located at Baghdad Airport. [WASHINGTON POST, 5/9/2004; NEW YORKER, 5/10/2004] She becomes the first female general officer to lead US soldiers in combat. [WASHINGTON POST, 5/12/2004] Karpinski’s brigade, consisting of 3,400 soldiers divided over three battalions, is initially put in charge of Camp Bucca and three other smaller facilities. At this time, Camp Bucca holds about 3,500 prisoners. [SIGNAL NEWSPAPER, 7/4/2004]
Entity Tags: Janis L. Karpinski
Timeline Tags: Torture of US Captives
July 27, 2003: Pentagon Announces Charges Against Four Soldiers over Detainee Abuse in IraqEdit event
The Pentagon announces that four US soldiers from a Pennsylvania-based Army Reserve have been charged with punching, kicking, and breaking the bones of Iraqi captives at Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr in connection with the May 12 incident (see May 12, 2003). This is the first known case where US soldiers are charged for alleged illegal treatment toward prisoners of war. [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 7/27/2003] By January 2004, the soldiers will have all been discharged after Brig. Gen. Ennis Whitehead III determines that they had kicked prisoners or encouraged others to do so. [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 11/25/2003; ASSOCIATED PRESS, 1/16/2004]
Entity Tags: Ennis Whitehead III
Timeline Tags: Torture of US Captives
September 3, 2003: Detainees Injured by Exploding BombEdit event
Three detainees at Camp Bucca who volunteered for a cleaning job are severely injured when they inadvertently set off a cluster bomb. All three will have their legs amputated. [INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS, 2/24/2004 pdf file]
Timeline Tags: Torture of US Captives
September 22, 2003: Red Cross Hears Mistreatment Allegations from Old Iraqi DetaineeEdit event
A delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) interviews a 61-year-old Iraqi who has been imprisoned in Camp Bucca. The elderly man tells the ICRC that at the time of his arrest, he was “tied, hooded, and forced to sit on the hot surface of what he surmised to be the engine of a vehicle….” The ICRC verifies his account noting that the presence of “large crusted lesions” on his buttocks were consistent with his allegation. [INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS, 2/24/2004 pdf file]
Entity Tags: International Committee of the Red Cross
Timeline Tags: Torture of US Captives
October 23, 2003: Red Cross Writes to Gen. Karpinski About Recent Shootings at Camp BuccaEdit event
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) writes a letter to Gen. Janis Karpinski in relation to a recent shooting incident (see September 22, 2003) at Camp Bucca and recommends that she takes appropriate measures. The same letter also asks her to investigate another incident that took place on September 3 (see September 3, 2003) at the same camp. In that incident, three detainees doing a voluntary cleaning job were severely injured when a cluster bomb went off. [INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS, 2/24/2004 pdf file]
Entity Tags: International Committee of the Red Cross, Janis L. Karpinski
Timeline Tags: Torture of US Captives
April 2, 2004: Army Documents 62 Cases of Abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, 26 Involving Detainee DeathsEdit event
The Army issues a classified “Information Paper” entitled “Allegations of Detainee Abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan” that details the status of 62 investigations into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and other sites in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cases documented in the paper include allegations of assaults, physical assaults, mock executions, sexual assaults, threatening to kill an Iraqi child to “send a message to other Iraqis,” stripping detainees, beating them and shocking them with a blasting device, throwing rocks at handcuffed Iraqi children, choking detainees with knots of their scarves, and interrogations at gunpoint. The document will be released to the public by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2006 (see May 2, 2006). Of the 62 cases, 26 involve detainee deaths. Some have already gone through courts-martial proceedings. The cases involve allegations from Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca, and other sites in Mosul, Samarra, Baghdad, and Tikrit, and the Orgun-E facility in Afghanistan. [AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION, 5/2/2006]

[seemslikeadream]

The mysterious link between the US military prison Camp Bucca and ISIS leaders

Al-Akhbar is currently going through a transitional phase whereby the English website is available for Archival purposes only. All new content will be published in Arabic on the main website (www.al-akhbar.com).
Al-Akhbar Management


A flag of the Islamic State (IS) is seen on the other side of a bridge at the frontline of fighting between Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Islamist militants in Rashad, on the road between Kirkuk and Tikrit, on September 11, 2014. (Photo: AFP-JM Lopez)
By: Mohammed Mahmoud Mortada
Published Saturday, September 13, 2014
Beyond conspiracy theories – which are often justified in an era where everything appears as though it is part of a plan or a scheme – we have the right to ask why the majority of the leaders of the Islamic State (IS), formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), had all been incarcerated in the same prison at Camp Bucca, which was run by the US occupation forces near Omm Qasr in southeastern Iraq.

In the context of conspiracy theories, there are a lot of rumors about links between IS and the US intelligence or affiliated organizations. But to what extent are these theories credible? Is there evidence that corroborate them?

These questions seem legitimate, provided that ready-made answers are not accepted without convincing evidence. However, it is difficult to get this kind of evidence, and we might need another Edward Snowden or WikiLeaks to learn the real truth about the relationship between IS and US intelligence.

Yet not having this evidence should not prevent us from trying to gather some clues that may not amount to definitive evidence, but which will no doubt question the narrative that fully exonerates US intelligence from involvement with the jihadis.

First of all, most IS leaders had passed through the former U.S. detention facility at Camp Bucca in Iraq. So who were the most prominent of these detainees?

Abu Ayman al-Iraqi… also “graduated” from Camp Bucca, and currently serves as a member on IS’ military council. The leader of IS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, tops the list. He was detained from 2004 until mid-2006. After he was released, he formed the Army of Sunnis, which later merged with the so-called Mujahideen Shura Council.
What happened during Baghdadi’s detention in Bucca remains a mystery. Some press reports said he had been detained as a “civilian” in prison for 10 months in 2004, while other reports stated he was captured by the US forces in 2005 and held for four years at Camp Bucca. This latter possibility is unlikely, given that Baghdadi had formed the Army of Sunnis and joined the Mujahideen Shura Council shortly before the assassination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006. This is while bearing in mind that this council was established in January 2006, which makes it more likely that Baghdadi had been released either in late 2005 or early 2006.

It should be noted that after the Army of the Sunnis merged with the Mujahideen Shura Council, the Americans were able to successfully hunt down the leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq, starting with Zarqawi in 2006, and not ending with Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Hamza al-Muhajir in 2010, the death of the former being the event that paved the way for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to become the organization’s leader.

Another prominent IS leader today is Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, who was a former officer in the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein. This man also “graduated” from Camp Bucca, and currently serves as a member on IS’ military council.

Another member of the military council who was in Bucca is Adnan Ismail Najm. He was known as Osama al-Bilawi (Abu Abdul_Rahman al-Bilawi). IS named the operation for the “invasion of Mosul” after him. He was detained on January 2005 in Bucca, and was also a former officer in Saddam’s army. He was the head of a shura council in IS, before he was killed by the Iraqi army near Mosul on June 4, 2014.

Camp Bucca was also home to Haji Samir, aka Haji Bakr, whose real name is Samir Abed Hamad al-Obeidi al-Dulaimi. He was a colonel in the army of the former Iraqi regime. He was detained in Bucca, and after his release, he joined al-Qaeda. He was the top man in ISIS in Syria, but was killed in Aleppo in the first week of January 2014.

According to the testimonies of US officers who worked in the prison, the administration of Camp Bucca had taken measures including the segregation of prisoners on the basis of their ideology. This, according to experts, made it possible to recruit people directly and indirectly.

Former detainees had said in documented television interviews that Bucca, which was closed down in September 2009, was akin to an “al-Qaeda school.” Former detainees had said in documented television interviews that Bucca, which was closed down in September 2009, was akin to an “al-Qaeda school,” where senior extremist gave lessons on explosives and suicide attacks to younger prisoners. A former prisoner named Adel Jassem Mohammed said that one of the extremists remained in the prison for two weeks only, but even so was able to recruit 25 out of 34 inmates who were there. Mohammed also said that U.S. military officials did nothing to stop the extremists from mentoring the other detainees.
While Camp Bucca is the common denominator among most IS leaders, another one is the fact that a majority of them were officers in the Baathist army, which explains the ease with which the radical group has been able to infiltrate the clans and coax some of their leaders into joining its ranks.

Another noteworthy point is that none of the leaders who had emerged out of Bucca and who were subsequently killed, were killed in U.S. airstrikes, but rather at the hands of the Iraqi army, the Syrian army, or in fighting with other armed groups.

What had happened in Bucca then? What were the circumstances that made all those former detainees subsequent leaders in the extremist group? These questions require answers and serious investigations. No doubt, we will one day discover that many more leaders in the group had been detained in Bucca as well, which seems to have been more of a “terrorist academy” than a prison.

The final point that cannot be ignored is that the creation of ISIS has greatly weakened al-Qaeda.

[AlicetheKurious]

As sectarian violence flares in Iraq, Gerrond thinks back to a "chilling conversation" he had with a "Shia Iraqi corrections officer" at Camp Bucca. He "stated to me (through a translator) that when the Americans departed Iraq, his only request was that we leave them enough ammunition so that they could kill all the [Sunni] detainees that were being held."

All part of the plan. Round up young sunni Iraqis, torture them until they break, bring in the psychiatrists to brainwash them and reshape them into fanatic, psychotic zombies. Fuel their sectarian hatred by appointing vicious "corrections officers" who are shi'a and setting them loose against the prisoners. Similarly, the US appointment of the fanatic and murderous Nuri Al-Maliki, whose pitiless shi'a militiamen murdered thousands of sunni Iraqis, especially army officers, served to radicalize the latter and pushed them into the ranks of sectarian sunni Iraqi militias.

The US invaded and occupied Iraq for three purposes: 1) Destroy the Iraqi army; 2) Fragment the country into mutually hostile and warring sectarian mini-states; 3) Transform Iraq into an incubator and launching pad for sectarian terrorists to replicate the Iraqi model in all the other Arab states.

"Iraq is the tactical pivot..."

[conniption]

Open Democracy

ISIS wants to destroy the 'grey zone'. Here's how we defend it
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
16 November 2015

[justdrew]

good lawrd, now we're to believe hat isis is looking for "Red Mercury"!

always fun to pull out that bit of bullshit, seems to be on a ten year cycle.

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating story about ISIS efforts to get their hands on a mysterious and powerful superweapon called Red Mercury. The problem is that by consensus among scientific authorities, Red Mercury doesn't exist. And yet that hasn't stopped the legend of Red Mercury, touted by sources from Nazi conspiracy theorists to former Manhattan Project scientists, as having magical properties. Middle East weapons traders have even spun elaborate stories for its properties (ranging from thermonuclear explosive properties to sexual enhancement) and origins and sources (from Soviet weapons labs to Roman graveyards). What can account for the enduring myth of Red Mercury — is it rampant scientific illiteracy, the power of urban legend and shared myth, or something else?

here you go isis, red mercury...

[AlicetheKurious]

The so-called "revolutionaries", "insurgents", "freedom fighters" are nothing but ragtag human refuse collected from all over the world, brainwashed, hopped up on drugs, and waved around by the US and its puppets to divert the eyes of the world from the US/Zionist War of Aggression against Syria.

This article appeared after a Saudi prince was busted by the Lebanese authorities for trying to smuggle several tons of Captagon in his private plane. Huge quantities of Captagon are either produced or transported into and out of Arsal, in the Bekaa Valley, a town that is nicknamed "the mother of the (Syrian) 'revolution'".

The CIA propaganda mouthpiece Washington Post doesn't want people to make the obvious connection between the massive imports by Saudi Arabia of psychotropic drugs such as Captagon, and the drugs' proliferation among the so-called "revolutionaries" whom Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been supporting with everything from weapons to food and clothing. It claims, without citing any evidence at all, that the drug is manufactured in such massive quantities inside Syria itself.

The tiny pill fueling Syria’s war and turning fighters into superhuman soldiers

By Peter Holley November 19 at 8:00 AM

As The Post's Liz Sly recently noted, the war in Syria has become a tangled web of conflict dominated by "al-Qaeda veterans, hardened Iraqi insurgents, Arab jihadist ideologues and Western volunteers."

On the surface, those competing actors are fueled by an overlapping mixture of ideologies and political agendas.

Just below it, experts suspect, they're powered by something else: Captagon.

A tiny, highly addictive pill produced in Syria and widely available across the Middle East, its illegal sale funnels hundreds of millions of dollars back into the war-torn country's black-market economy each year, likely giving militias access to new arms, fighters and the ability to keep the conflict boiling, according to the Guardian.

“Syria is a tremendous problem in that it’s a collapsed security sector, because of its porous borders, because of the presence of so many criminal elements and organized networks,” the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) regional representative, Masood Karimipour, told Voice of America. “There’s a great deal of trafficking being done of all sorts of illicit goods — guns, drugs, money, people. But what is being manufactured there and who is doing the manufacturing, that’s not something we have visibility into from a distance.”

A powerful amphetamine tablet based on the original synthetic drug known as "fenethylline," Captagon quickly produces a euphoric intensity in users, allowing Syria's fighters to stay up for days, killing with a numb, reckless abandon.

"You can't sleep or even close your eyes, forget about it," said a Lebanese user, one of three who appeared on camera without their names for a BBC Arabic documentary that aired in September. "And whatever you take to stop it, nothing can stop it."

"I felt like I own the world high," another user said. "Like I have power nobody has. A really nice feeling."

"There was no fear anymore after I took Captagon," a third man added.

According to a Reuters report published in 2014, the war has turned Syria into a "major" amphetamines producer -- and consumer.

"Syrian government forces and rebel groups each say the other uses Captagon to endure protracted engagements without sleep, while clinicians say ordinary Syrians are increasingly experimenting with the pills, which sell for between $5 and $20," Reuters reported.

Captagon has been around in the West since the 1960s, when it was given to people suffering from hyperactivity, narcolepsy and depression, according to the Reuters report. By the 1980s, according to Reuters, the drug's addictive power led most countries to ban its use.

The United State classified fenethylline ("commonly known by the trademark name Captagon") as a Schedule I drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act in 1981, according to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service

Still, the drug didn't exactly disappear.

VOA notes that while Westerners have speculated that the drug is being used by Islamic State fighters, the biggest consumer has for years been Saudi Arabia. In 2010, a third of the world's supply — about seven tons — ended up in Saudi Arabia, according to Reuters. VOA estimated that as many as 40,000 to 50,000 Saudis go through drug treatment each year.

“My theory is that Captagon still retains the veneer of medical respectability,” Justin Thomas, an assistant professor of psychology and psychotherapy at the UAE’s Zayed University and author of "Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States," told VOA in 2010. “It may not be viewed as a drug or narcotic because it is not associated with smoking or injecting.”

Five years later, production of Captagon has taken root in Syria — long a heavily trafficked thoroughfare for drugs journeying from Europe to the Gulf States — and it has begun to blossom.

"The breakdown of state infrastructure, weakening of borders and proliferation of armed groups during the ... battle for control of Syria, has transformed the country from a stopover into a major production site," Reuters reported.

"Production in Lebanon's Bekaa valley – a traditional centre for the drug – fell 90% last year from 2011, with the decline largely attributed to production inside Syria," the Guardian noted.

Cheap and easy to produce using legal materials, the drug can be purchased for less than $20 a tablet and is popular among those Syrian fighters who don't follow strict interpretations of Islamic law, according to the Guardian.

Doctors report that the drug has dangerous side effects, including psychosis and brain damage, according to the BBC.

Ramzi Haddad, a Lebanese psychiatrist, told Reuters that the drug produces the typical effects of a stimulant.

"You're talkative, you don't sleep, you don't eat, you're energetic," he said.

According to the news service:

A drug control officer in the central city of Homs told Reuters he had observed the effects of Captagon on protesters and fighters held for questioning.

"We would beat them, and they wouldn't feel the pain. Many of them would laugh while we were dealing them heavy blows," he said. "We would leave the prisoners for about 48 hours without questioning them while the effects of Captagon wore off, and then interrogation would become easier."

One secular ex-Syrian fighter who spoke to the BBC said the drug is tailor-made for the battlefield because of its ability to give soldiers superhuman energy and courage:

"So the brigade leader came and told us, 'this pill gives you energy, try it,' " he said. "So we took it the first time. We felt physically fit. And if there were 10 people in front of you, you could catch them and kill them. You're awake all the time. You don't have any problems, you don't even think about sleeping, you don't think to leave the checkpoint. It gives you great courage and power. If the leader told you to go break into a military barracks, I will break in with a brave heart and without any feeling of fear at all — you're not even tired."

Another ex-fighter told the BBC that his 350-person brigade took the pill without knowing if it was a drug or medicine for energy.

"Some people became addicted to it and it will damage the addicts," he said. "This is the problem."

This post has been updated. Link

From 2014:

Sitting in the lobby of a run-down, less-than-one-star, dockside hotel opposite the Mediterranean, a lodging establishment occasionally used as quarters by various militia, this observer and his companion spoke leisurely one early morning with one of Ali Kyali’s sons and a companion. When not fighting jihadists (in “Have AK-47, Will Travel”-mode), they are among his father’s bodyguards. I have for a while been interested in claims by Western governments that they are supplying “humanitarian non-lethal aid” to rebel groups, including night goggles, telecommunication equipment, and GPS devices. This observer views all such equipment as misnamed and indeed lethal inasmuch as they facilitate one side killing the other via night snipers or through expedition of troop movements. I was a bit surprised to learn what PFLI fighters thought of this kind of equipment being given to their adversaries and labeled ‘humanitarian aid.’

“Not having night goggles, except for some we take off the enemy, is not much of a problem for us because we can sense where al Nusra fighters are, and they tend not to fight at night,” Ali’s son told me.

I asked why the reluctance to fight at night, thinking maybe it had something to do with a religious edict of some sort, but once more I was mistaken.

“No it’s not that, it’s because they are too paranoid and exhausted, from taking captagon and even stronger drugs, to fight at night.”

According the guys I was sitting with, some with more than two years fighting experience with the PFLI, many, if not most, of the Gulf-sponsored jihadists are given bags of pills to enhance their battlefield courage. And it works to a degree. At dawn each day, jihadists take drugs, including large doses of captagon and other widely available drugs. There also are some particularly potent drugs, known locally as “baltcon,” “afoun,” and ”zolm,” as well as opium, heroin, cocaine, and hashish. The main drug routes into the Syrian battle zones, I was advised, run from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Lebanon, with lesser amounts coming via Turkey, Iraq and Jordan. Lebanon’s Bekaa valley apparently produces large amounts of captagon pills for shipment to the Gulf, and now to Syria. Jihadists high on drugs apparently feel invincible, and hostile, and do not fear death. Many are indeed ferocious and fearless fighters during the day, as many media sources have reported. But by nightfall, when the drug wears off, the fighters become exhausted and sometimes are found asleep on the very scene of battle they were fighting from.

“Many of the ‘Gulfies’ are in fact heavily addicted to strong heroin-like drugs. They crave them, and sometimes they even fight with their fellow militiamen to get their ‘fixes.’ We are told by some we capture that sometimes, when one of their comrades is killed, the fallen fighter’s ‘friends’ will descend on his body, not particularly to pray over it, but to rummage his pockets for his drugs.”

In point of fact, in 2011 alone, Lebanese authorities confiscated three amphetamine production labs, in addition to two Captagon-producing labs, which they claim were responsible for sending hundreds of thousands of the pills to the Gulf. The seizure of trucks with captagon in their chassis in Lebanon, and at Beirut airport, shows a growing demand for these products in the Syrian militia market. The UN recently reported that the Middle and Near East are experiencing the majority of drug busts globally.

Al Nusra Front and ISIS—being some of the more extreme “imported jihadists,” as some here call them—claim to be better fighters than Hezbollah, whose units set the fighting skill bar fairly high these days. Some of them claim they have not really started their battle to defeat Hezbollah on its own territory, but will do so when they are ready. But as one PFLI fighter explained, and some of his buddies nodded agreement, only when high on drugs do Qatari/Saudi jihadists exhibit bravery and bravado. Only then do they pose a serious threat, because they ignore normal defensive fighting tactics.

“We know many of these guys quite well. Lots of them were never even religious. There are many who are drug addicts, who get high and lose their fear of dying, so they are dangerous to confront, and they often use strange tactics.”

According to another PFLI source, the “imported Jihadists” die in high numbers because they ignore the battlefield realities. Their average number of dead in any given firefight over the past two years is estimated to be approximately five times the number of Hezbollah casualties, three times the number of PFLI fighters, and twice the number of casualties than the regular Syrian army.

As the Syrian crisis enters its fourth year, with more jihadists arriving and more militia being formed across the political and religious spectrum, the US intelligence community and congressional sources are now predicting the war will continue for another decade or more. It’s anyone’s guess what the post-Syrian crisis period will bring to this region given the rise of ethno-nationalism along with demands for the return of Sykes-Picot land grabs. There are also growing signs of a cataclysmic intifada in Palestine. When you add to all that US intelligence predictions of the overthrow of two, and possibly three, Gulf monarchies, another Hezbollah-Zionist war, plus the deterioration of the social and religious fabric across the region, the future looks bleak indeed. Link

These are the brave freedom-fighting revolutionaries that the US is supplying with weapons, training and logistics. This is the reality of "ISIS", which Hollywood and the CIA have collaborated to promote as the Formidable Enemy of the Free World. No wonder the Syrian and Russian armies are making short work of them, prompting the US and its allies to drop the utterly discredited meme of "revolution" and step up their direct attacks against Syria.

[IanEye]

heads ripe - lead pipe
smacks you on the backside
slaps your skull to crushed ice
would you like a drink
of a little known truth

[conniption]

informationclearinghouse

Israeli Colonel Caught with IS Pants Down

By F. William Engdahl

November 26, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "NEO" -

This was definitely not supposed to happen. It seems that an Israeli military man with the rank of colonel was “caught with IS pants down.” By that I mean he was captured amid a gaggle of so-called IS–or Islamic State or ISIS or DAESH depending on your preference–terrorists, by soldiers of the Iraqi army. Under interrogation by the Iraqi intelligence he apparently said a lot regarding the role of Netanyahu’s IDF in supporting IS.

In late October an Iranian news agency, quoting a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, reported the capture of an Israeli army colonel, named Yusi Oulen Shahak, reportedly related to the ISIS Golani Battalion operating in Iraq in the Salahuddin front. In a statement to Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency a Commander of the Iraqi Army stated, “The security and popular forces have held captive an Israeli colonel.” He added that the IDF colonel “had participated in the Takfiri ISIL group’s terrorist operations.” He said the colonel was arrested together with a number of ISIL or IS terrorists, giving the details: “The Israeli colonel’s name is Yusi Oulen Shahak and is ranked colonel in Golani Brigade… with the security and military code of Re34356578765az231434.”

Why Israel?

Ever since the beginning of Russia’s very effective IS bombing of select targets in Syria on September 30, details of the very dirty role of not only Washington, but also NATO member Turkey under President Erdogan, Qatar and other states has come into the sunlight for the first time.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that at least a faction in the Obama Administration has played a very dirty behind-the-scenes role in supporting IS in order to advance the removal of Syrian President Bashar al Assad and pave the way for what inevitably would be a Libya-style chaos and destruction which would make the present Syrian refugee crisis in Europe a mere warmup by comparison.

The “pro-IS faction” in Washington includes the so-called neo-conservatives centered around disgraced former CIA head and executioner of the Iraqi “surge” General David Petraeus. It also includes US General John R. Allen, who since September 2014 had served as President Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and, until she resigned in February 2013, it included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Significantly, General John Allen, an unceasing advocate of a US-led “No Fly Zone” inside Syria along the border to Turkey, something President Obama refused, was relieved of his post on 23 October, 2015. That was shortly after launch of the highly-effective Russian strikes on Syrian IS and Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front terrorist sites changed the entire situation in the geopolitical picture of Syria and the entire Middle East.

UN Reports cites Israel

That Netanyahu’s Likud and the Israeli military work closely with Washington’s neo-conservative war-hawks is well-established, as is the vehement opposition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Israel regards the Iranian-backed Shi’a Islamist militant group, Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, as arch foe. Hezbollah has been actively fighting alongside the Syrian Army against ISIS in Syria. General Allen’s strategy of “bombings of ISIS” since he was placed in charge of the operation in September 2014, as Russia’s Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have repeatedly pointed out, far from destroying ISIS in Syria, had vastly expanded their territorial control of the country. Now it becomes clear that that was precisely the intent of Allen and the Washington war faction.

Since at least 2013 Israeli military have also openly bombed what they claim were Hezbollah targets inside Syria. Investigation revealed that in fact Israel was hitting Syrian military and Hezbollah targets who are valiantly fighting against ISIS and other terrorists. De facto thereby Israel was actually helping ISIS, like General John Allen’s year-long “anti-ISIS” bombings.

That a faction in the Pentagon has secretly worked behind-the-scenes to train, arm and finance what today is called ISIS or IS in Syria is now a matter of open record. In August 2012, a Pentagon document classified “Secret,” later declassified under pressure of the US NGO Judicial Watch, detailed precisely the emergence of what became the Islamic State or ISIS emerging from the Islamic State in Iraq, then an Al Qaeda affiliate.

The Pentagon document stated, “…there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition [to Assad-w.e.] want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).” The supporting powers to the opposition in 2012 then included Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the USA and behind-the-scenes, Netanyahu’s Israel.

Precisely this creation of a “Salafist Principality in eastern Syria,” today’s territory of ISIL or IS, was the agenda of Petraeus, General Allen and others in Washington to destroy Assad. It’s what put the Obama Administration at loggerhead with Russia, China and Iran over the bizarre US demand Assad must first go before ISIS can be destroyed. Now the game is in the open for the world to see Washington’s duplicity in backing what the Russian’s accurately call “moderate terrorists” against a duly-elected Assad. That Israel is also in the midst of this rats’ nest of opposition terrorist forces in Syria was confirmed in a recent UN report.

What the report did not mention was why Israeli IDF military would have such a passionate interest in Syria, especially Syria’s Golan Heights.

Why Israel wants Assad Out

In December, 2014 the Jerusalem Post in Israel reported the findings of a largely ignored, and politically explosive report detailing UN sightings of Israeli military together with ISIS terrorist combatants. The UN peacekeeping force, UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), stationed since 1974 along the Golan Heights border between Syria and Israel, revealed that Israel had been working closely with Syrian opposition terrorists, including Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front and IS in the Golan Heights, and “kept close contact over the past 18 months.” The report was submitted to the UN Security Council. Mainstream media in the US and West buried the explosive findings.

The UN documents showed that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were maintaining regular contact with members of the so-called Islamic State since May of 2013. The IDF stated that this was only for medical care for civilians, but the deception was broken when the UNDOF observers identified direct contact between IDF forces and ISIS soldiers, including giving medical care to ISIS fighters. Observations even included the transfer of two crates from the IDF to ISIS forces, the contents of which have not been confirmed. Further the UN report identified what the Syrians label a “crossing point of forces between Israel and ISIS,” a point of concern UNDOF brought before the UN Security Council.

The UNDOF was created by a May, 1974 UN Security Council Resolution No. 350 in the wake of tensions from the October 1973 Yom Kippur War between Syria and Israel. It established a buffer zone between Israel and Syria’s Golan Heights according to the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement, to be governed and policed by the Syrian authorities. No military forces other than UNDOF are permitted within it. Today it has 1,200 observers.

Since 2013 and the escalation of Israeli attacks on Syria along the Golan Heights, claiming pursuit of “Hezbollah terrorists,” the UNDOF itself has been subject to massive attacks by ISIS or Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front terrorists in the Golan Heights for the first time since 1974, of kidnappings, of killings, of theft of UN weapons and ammunition, vehicles and other assets, and the looting and destruction of facilities. Someone obviously does not want UNDOF to remain policing the Golan Heights.

Israel and Golan Heights Oil

In his November 9 White House meeting with US President Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu asked Washington to reconsider the fact that since the 1967 Six-Days’ War between Israel and the Arab countries, Israel has illegally occupied a significant part of the Golan Heights. In their meeting, Netanyahu, apparently without success, called on Obama to back formal Israeli annexation of the illegally-occupied Golan Heights, claiming that the absence of a functioning Syrian government “allows for different thinking” concerning the future status of the strategically important area.

Of course Netanyahu did not address in any honest way how Israeli IDF and other forces had been responsible for the absence of a functioning Syrian government by their support for ISIS and Al Nusra Front of Al Qaeda.

In 2013, when UNDOF began to document increasing contact between Israeli military and IS and Al Qaeda along the Golan Heights, a little-known Newark, New Jersey oil company, Genie Energy, with an Israeli daughter company, Afek Oil & Gas, began also moving into Golan Heights with permission of the Netanyahu government to explore for oil. That same year Israeli military engineers overhauled the forty-five mile border fence with Syria, replacing it with a steel barricade that included barbed wire, touch sensors, motion detectors, infrared cameras, and ground radar, putting it on par with the Wall Israel has constructed in the West Bank.

Interestingly enough, on October 8, Yuval Bartov, chief geologist from Genie Energy’s Israeli subsidiary, Afek Oil & Gas, told Israel’s Channel 2 TV that his company had found a major oil reservoir on the Golan Heights: “We’ve found an oil stratum 350 meters thick in the southern Golan Heights. On average worldwide, strata are 20 to 30 meters thick, and this is 10 times as large as that, so we are talking about significant quantities.” As I noted in an earlier article, the International Advisory Board of Genie Energy includes such notorious names as Dick Cheney, former CIA head and infamous neo-con James Woolsey, Jacob Lord Rothschild and others.

Of course no reasonable person in their right mind would suggest there might be a link between Israeli military dealings with the ISIS and other anti-Assad terrorists in Syria, especially in the Golan Heights, and the oil find of Genie Energy in the same place, and with Netanyahu’s latest Golan Heights “rethink” appeal to Obama. That would smell too much like “conspiracy theory” and all reasonable people know conspiracies don’t exist, only coincidences. Or? In fact, to paraphrase the immortal words of Brad Pitt in the role of West Virginia First Lieutenant Aldo Raine in the final scene of Tarantino’s brilliant film, Inglorious Basterds, it seems that ‘Ol Netanyahu and his pecker-suckin pals in the IDF and Mossad just got caught with their hands in a very dirty cookie jar in Syria.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

[seemslikeadream]

thank you

[AlicetheKurious]

informationclearinghouse

Israeli Colonel Caught with IS Pants Down

By F. William Engdahl

Great minds think alike; I just posted this in the other "ISIS" thread. Maybe we should all stick to one thread from now on, to avoid repetition.

[solace]

Bullshit, again.

Crazy conspiracy
Spoiler: Benny Gantz wasn’t captured by Iraqi forces
Official Iranian mouthpiece and others claim former IDF chief caught while aiding Islamic State. Er, no
By Judah Ari Gross October 28, 2015, 8:24 pm 10

Rumors that a high-ranking IDF officer had been captured while working alongside Islamic State forces began circulating on the Internet last week, beginning on assorted websites dedicated almost solely to starting and perpetuating conspiracy theories and later being picked up by the Iranian government’s official mouthpiece Fars news.

An Israeli brigadier general or colonel — the reports vary — from the Golani Brigade named Yussi Elon Shahak was allegedly caught by Iraqi forces, the websites claim.

“The Zionist officer is ranked colonel and had participated in the Takfiri ISIL group’s terrorist operations,” the Fars News Agency claimed an Iraqi commander said.

The assertion was backed up with a photograph of the offending officer and turned into a readily sharable graphic, which was promptly shared on Facebook and Twitter.

In fact, the photograph does not show a brigadier general or a colonel, the man in it is not named Yussi Shahak and all of the so-called proof offered falls apart almost immediately when held up to any level of scrutiny.

While no discerning person could believe the bogus claim, for the sake of thoroughness The Times of Israel has broken down the allegations, as presented by the conspiracy theorizers, fact by fact for your enlightenment and entertainment:

Look closely at this man, his name is Yussi Elon Shahak.

No, it’s not. His name is Benny Gantz. He served as IDF Chief of the General Staff for four years from 2011-2015.

He is Jewish Israeli officer.

True! Benny Gantz is absolutely Israeli and Jewish. Though he left the IDF in February 2015, he is still considered a reserve officer.

His rank is brigadier.

Gantz has not been a brigadier general since 1998, when he rose to the rank to become the commander of the Etgar Division, a now defunct reservist unit that was a part of the IDF’s Northern Command until 2004.

His military number is Re34356578765Az231434.

No, it’s not. This is the wrong format for Israeli army ID numbers. Every soldier does indeed get a “personal number,” as it’s called, but these are quite a bit shorter than the 21-digit alphanumeric sequence listed. IDF personal numbers are a mere seven digits long.

He was captured by the Iraqi popular Army.

The Iraqi Popular Army (note the capitalization) dissolved in 1991 with the First Gulf War; however, perhaps the creator of this graphic was referring to some other military force that is currently all the rage among the residents of Iraq.

He is commanding ISIS terrorists.

Benny Gantz is currently the chairman of a high-tech company called “Fifth Dimension,” which is developing advanced artificial intelligence. Just last month he gave a speech in Washington, DC about Israeli national security.

Some other websites carrying this story, including the official Iranian government mouthpiece Fars News, allege that the Israeli officer in question was a former Golani Brigade colonel, and not a brigadier general.

Gantz, however, did not serve in Golani. A quick search through former commanders of the Golani Brigade shows that none of them is named Yussi Elon Shahak; almost all of the recent colonels from the infantry brigade are either still in the army in high-ranking and highly public capacities or are in equally public positions in civilian society. Or else they are well into their seventies and not likely to be dropping into war zones.

This information is confirmed by the Foreign Affairs High Representative at the USA Parliament.

The United States has a congress, not a parliament. A parliament is by definition the leading governing body of a country, above the executive branch. In Israel, for example, the Knesset is a parliament, above the powers of the president. A congress, meanwhile, is on the same level as the executive. The two have distinct and separate legal powers.

The United States government also does not have a position of Foreign Affairs High Representative, though the European Union does. Its high representative is currently Frederica Mogherini.

And confirmed by the Secretary General of the “DESI” European Department for Security and Information

The European Department for Security and Information is not an official body in any European country. Its raison d’être appears to be the propagation of fantastic conspiracy theories.

And confirmed by Ambassador Dr. Haissam Bou-Said.

This man’s name can only be found on websites of the lowest repute. He has claimed to be an ambassador to multiple countries, including Liberia, Guinea-Bissau and Lebanon. His alleged medical degree comes from the Open International University of Alternative Medicine, a diploma mill, which for a small fee awards degrees for passing a single examination.

Now think…Why is Israel behind IS?

Considering the recent release of two videos by the Islamic State — one which applauded the stabbing attacks against Israeli civilians, police and soldiers and another, directly threatening Israelis that once IS terrorists begin operating in Israel “not one Jew will be left alive” — it is more than likely that Israel is not in fact behind the terror organization.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/benny-gant ... qi-forces/

But then again, Iran said it so who needs to fact check for truth when it's against Israel. Right, Alice and other dupes?