"As Assad is the main opponent of ISIS, we are covertly coordinating our airstrikes against ISIS with Assad. So are we against Assad, or not? It's ambivalent" I think that Obama and everybody around him is clear that they do not any longer as they've been saying want Assad to leave power. I don't believe that that is their intention anymore, as they believe anyone who succeeds Assad would be far worse."
If true, Ellsberg's analysis exposes the deep-rooted hypocrisy of the previous campaign against Assad, the current campaign against ISIS, and why both appear destined for failure.
Coleen Rowley, retired FBI Special Agent described my report on the DIA document as "excellent."
Rowley, who was selected as TIME 'Person of the Year' in 2002 after revealing how pre-9/11 intelligence was ignored by superiors at the FBI, said of the document:
"It's like the mad power-hungry doctor who created Frankenstein, only to have his monster turn against him. It's hard to feel sorry when the insane doctor gets his due. But in our case, that script is constantly repeating. The quest for 'full spectrum dominance' and blindness of exceptionalism seems to mean we are doomed to keep repeating the 'Charlie Wilson's Frankenstein War' script" The various neocon warmongers and military industrial complex, most of them inept Peter Principles, just don't care."
Also commenting on the declassified Pentagon report, former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake"--"the whistleblower who inspired Edward Snowden"--"condemned "the West's role in ISIS and threat of 'violent extremists', justifying surveillance and libercide at home."
Thomas Drake, former NSA senior executive, who leaked information in 2006 about the NSA's corrupt and dysfunction Trailblazer project.
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Alastair Crooke, a former senior MI6 officer who spent three decades at the agency, said yesterday that the DIA document provides clear corroboration that the US was covertly pursuing a strategy to drive an extremist Salafi "wedge" between Iran and its Arab allies.
The strategy was, Crooke confirms, standard thinking in the Western intelligence establishment for about a decade.
"The idea of breaking up the large Arab states into ethnic or sectarian enclaves is an old Ben Gurion 'canard,' and splitting Iraq along sectarian lines has been Vice President Biden's recipe since the Iraq war," wrote Crooke, who had coordinated British assistance to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s. After his long MI6 stint, he became Middle East advisor to the European Union's foreign policy chief (1997--2003).
"But the idea of driving a Sunni 'wedge' into the landline linking Iran to Syria and to Hezbollah in Lebanon became established Western group think in the wake of the 2006 war, in which Israel failed to de-fang Hezbollah," continued Crooke. "The response to 2006, it seemed to Western powers, was to cut off Hezbollah from its sources of weapons supply from Iran"
-- In short, the DIA assessment indicates that the 'wedge' concept was being given new life by the desire to pressure Assad in the wake of the 2011 insurgency launched against the Syrian state. 'Supporting powers' effectively wanted to inject hydraulic fracturing fluid into eastern Syria (radical Salafists) in order to fracture the bridge between Iran and its Arab allies, even at the cost of this 'fracking' opening fissures right down inside Iraq to Ramadi. (Intelligence assessments purpose is to provide 'a view'"--"not to describe or prescribe policy. But it is clear that the DIA reports' 'warnings' were widely circulated and would have been meshed into the policy consideration.)
"But this 'view' has exactly come about. It is fact. One might conclude then that in the policy debate, the notion of isolating Hezbollah from Iran, and of weakening and pressurizing President Assad, simply trumped the common sense judgment that when you pump highly toxic and dangerous fracturing substances into geological formations, you can never entirely know or control the consequences" So, when the GCC demanded a 'price' for any Iran deal (i.e. massing 'fracking' forces close to Aleppo), the pass had been already partially been sold by the US by 2012, when it did not object to what the 'supporting powers' wanted."
Crooke's analysis of the DIA report shows that it is irrelevant whether or not "the West" should be included in the "supporting powers" described by the report as specifically wanting a "Salafist Principality" in eastern Syria. Either way, the report groups "the West, Gulf countries and Turkey" as supporting the Syrian insurgency together"--"highlighting that the Gulf states and Turkey operated in alliance with the US, Britain, and other Western powers.
The observations of intelligence experts Ellsberg, Rowley, and Drake add further weight to Crooke's analysis. They come in addition to comments I had previously received on the DIA document from former MI5 counter-terrorism officer, Annie Machon, and former counter-terrorism intelligence officer, Charles Shoebridge.
The comments undermine the recent claims ofdisgraced US national security commentator, John Schindler, a retired NSA intelligence officer, to the effect that the August 2012 DIA report is "almost incomprehensible," "so heavily redacted that its difficult to say much meaningful about it," "Nothing special here, not one bit," "routine," "a single data point," and so on.
Schindler cites the DIA's use of 'Curveball'"--"the Iraqi informant who fabricated claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD)"--"as evidence of the agency's "less than stellar reputation." But this misrepresents the fact noted by the CIA's Valerie Plame Wilson that "it was widely known [in the intelligence community] that CURVEBALL was not a credible source and that there were serious problems with his reporting."
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