Obama’s Speech at the UN General Assembly Address, 2014

‘President Barack Obama dinged Russia and declared the extremists in Syria and Iraq a “cancer” in his U.N. General Assembly speech on Wednesday (24 September 2014)’.

 

Wilful Blindness, Climate Corporatism and the Underground Revolt

‘Abby Martin speaks with journalist and author, Chris Hedges, going over where the recent mass climate change demonstrations in New York fall short, as well as why he believes revolt is the only solution to restoring a functioning American democracy (321 Sept 2014)’.

The Khorasan Group or Who is Muhsin al-Fadhli???

The economics and politics writer Tim Fernholz, on the ‘digitally native news outlet’ that is Quartz, established in 2012 by Atlantic for ‘business people in the new global economy’, confides that “US intelligence officials have spent the last week dropping hints about another al Qaeda off-shoot that does aim to attack Western countries at home, and it operates in ISIL’s backyard. The organization is known as ‘the Khorasan group’, a reference to a historic territory encompassing modern Afghanistan and Iran. Like ISIL, it has has roots in al Qaeda, but unlike the militants attempting to seize territory in Iraq and Syria, the Khorasan group is still within al Qaeda’s hierarchy and focused on terror attacks in the West”.[1] Now that the Islamic State (or ISIL or ISIS, if you will) has finally emerged as the West’s new bogeyman, it turns out that America is not content and feels the need to come up with yet another one for good measure . . . Fernholz continues that the “US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said this group [. that would be the Khorasan group] could be a more direct threat than ISIL and mentioned the leader’s name publicly for the first time: Muhsin al-Fadhli, a Kuwaiti who was a 20-year-old member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle at the time of the 9/11 attacks. By 2012, he was al Qaeda’s top man in Iran, financing terror operations in Iraq as a go-between for Gulf state donors, and earning a $7-million price on his head from the US. According to [a] CIA source who spoke with the New York Times following Clapper’s revelation, the now-33-year-old al-Fadhli is working with a cell of Afghan and Pakistani fighters in Syria to recruit Muslim extremists with US and European passports for attacks in their home countries. His organization is collaborating with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemeni offshoot of the extremist movement that has a reputation for attempts at sophisticated bomb-making designed to slip explosives past airport security procedures. Three have made it onto airplanes, but none of the plots have succeeded. It’s not clear why intelligence officials chose to reveal their concerns about the Khorasan group now. Some in the US government have been accused of exaggerating the threat of ISIL to the United States, but these revelations are a reminder that some of its ideological siblings are still focused on attacks in the West”.[2]

Does this mean that the U.S. does not see the Islamic State as a direct enough threat to America??? According to Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (a neoconservative Washington-based think tank) and writing about five months ago, “Muhsin al Fadhli, a senior al Qaeda leader who once headed the organization’s network in Iran, relocated to Syria in mid-2013, according to a report in The Arab Times on March 21 [, 2014]. Citing anonymous sources, the publication reports that al Fadhli has joined the Al Nusrah Front, al Qaeda’s official branch in Syria. He was apparently sent to the country after a dispute broke out between Al Nusrah and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (ISIS). Al Fadhli was one of the trusted operatives who reported back to Ayman al Zawahiri on the dispute, according to the Arab Times, and he influenced al Qaeda’s decision to eventually disown ISIS. Today, al Fadhli reportedly recruits European Muslims to join the jihad in Syria and ‘trains them on how to execute terror operations in the western countries, focusing mostly on means of public transportation such as trains and airplanes’. The Arab Times account does not identify its sources and parts of it do not ring true. For example, al Fadhli’s ‘four main targets’ inside Syria are supposedly Bashar al Assad’s forces, the Free Syrian Army, the Islamic Front, and ISIS. However, only two of these targets make sense in the current operational environment”.[3] So, it seems the man at the head of the group was an already well-known terrorist, but the name Khorasan Group had not been coined till recently. Joscelyn continues that “Al Fadhli became the leader of al Qaeda’s network inside Iran after a senior al Qaeda leader known as Yasin al Suri was detained by Iranian authorities”.[4] As the good folks of Wikipedia remind us: “Khorasan in its proper sense comprised principally the cities of Balkh, Herat, and Taloqan (now in Afghanistan), Mashhad, Nishapur, and Sabzevar (now in northeastern Iran), Merv and Nisa (now in southern Turkmenistan), and Samarqand and Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan)”.[5] And so it came about that Muhsin al Fadhli suddenly emerged on the scene as the leader of the Khorasan Group, a shadowy, even possibly non-extant organisation, with ‘clear’ links to the bogeyman of yesteryear, Al Qaeda . . . or to employ that nifty Escobarian phrase once more, the name that is a “catch-all ghost entity” . . . And now Obama has once again released genie from the bottle that Junior handled or even prepared in the aftermath of 9/11.

 

 

[1] Tim Fernholz, “Meet the terror group in Syria that could actually threaten the US” Quartz (22 September 2014). http://qz.com/269198/meet-the-terror-group-in-syria-that-could-actually-threaten-the-us/.

[2] Tim Fernholz, “Meet the terror group in Syria that could actually threaten the US”.

[3] Thomas Joscelyn, “Report: Former head of al Qaeda’s network in Iran now operates in Syria” The Long War Journal (28 March 2014). http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2014/03/report_former_head_o.php#ixzz3E9n7jGQn

[4] Thomas Joscelyn, “Report: Former head of al Qaeda’s network in Iran now operates in Syria”.

[5] “Greater Khorasan” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Khorasan.

The Bush Legacy: Junior’s Years in Power, 2001-2009

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“The Bush-Cheney era weighs heavily on America. Its divisions and disappointments help to explain much about today’s politics, from public war-weariness to the anti-establishment contempt that seethes among the Republican grassroots and the Tea Party. Insiders have already penned enough don’t-blame-me memoirs and score-settling biographies to dam the Potomac. [Peter Baker’s Bush biography Days of Fire] concentrates on relations between the two men at the top of the executive branch. His shrewd, meticulous reporting offers a useful corrective to tales of a puppet-master deputy manipulating an inexperienced boss”.[1]

 

[1] “Bush’s legacy” The Economist (26 Oct 2013). http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21588363-best-account-yet-failed-presidency-bushs-legacy.

Air Strikes against the IS: The War against the Caliphal Army is On!!!

Helen Cooper and Eric Schmitt write in the New York Times that the “United States and allies launched airstrikes against Sunni militants in Syria early Tuesday [, 23 September 2014], unleashing a torrent of cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs from the air and sea on the militants’ de facto capital of Raqqa and along the porous Iraq border. American fighter jets and armed Predator and Reaper drones, flying alongside warplanes from several Arab allies, struck a broad array of targets in territory controlled by the militants, known as the Islamic State. American defense officials said the targets included weapons supplies, depots, barracks and buildings the militants use for command and control. Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from United States Navy ships in the region. The strikes are a major turning point in President Obama’s war against the Islamic State and open up a risky new stage of the American military campaign. Until now, the administration had bombed Islamic State targets only in Iraq, and had suggested it would be weeks if not months before the start of a bombing campaign against Islamic State targets in Syria”. Significantly, “Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates took part in the strikes, American officials said, although the Arab governments were not expected to announce their participation until later Tuesday [, 23 September 2014]. The new coalition’s makeup is significant because the United States was able to recruit Sunni governments to take action against the Sunni militants of the Islamic State. The operation also unites the squabbling states of the Persian Gulf. The strikes came less than two weeks after Mr. Obama announced in an address to the nation that he was authorizing an expansion of the military campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS”.[1]

Cooper and Schmitt continue that “the salvo on Tuesday [, 23 September] in Syria was the beginning of what was expected to be a sustained, hourslong bombardment at targets in the militant headquarters in Raqqa and on the border. The strikes began after years of debate within the Obama administration about whether the United States should intervene militarily or should avoid another entanglement in a complex war in the Middle East. But the Islamic State controls a broad swath of land across both Iraq and Syria”.[ii] President Obama’s cautious consideration of all the options available has now led to a more direct engagement, but still apparently lacking the boots on the ground deemed necessary by so many. In the NYT, Cooper and Schmitt add that the “strikes in Syria occurred without the approval of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose government, unlike Iraq, did not ask the United States for help against the Sunni militant group. Mr. Obama has repeatedly called on Mr. Assad to step down because of chemical weapons attacks and violence against his own people, and defense officials said Mr. Assad had not been told in advance of the strikes. But administration officials acknowledge that American efforts to roll back the Sunni militant group in Syria cannot help but aid Mr. Assad, whose government is also a target of the Islamic State. The United Arab Emirates announced three weeks ago that it was willing to participate in the campaign against the Islamic State, and administration officials have also said they expect the Iraqi military to take part in strikes both in Iraq and Syria. If both nations are in fact participants, the strikes on Tuesday [, 22 September] could mark a rare instance when the Shiite-dominated Iraqi military has cooperated in a military operation with its Sunni Arab neighbors”.[3]

As such, a Syrian Twitter user named Abdulkader Hariri “is believed to have broken news of US air strikes in Syria 30 minutes before the Pentagon confirmed the military had launched attacks on the Isis stronghold of Raqqa alongside other countries”.[4] In the Independent, Heather Saul comments that the “air strikes are a major escalation of the US military response to Isis and come after President Barack Obama stressed it would not coordinate with the government of President Bashar al-Assad in any way in its fight against the group”.[5]

 

[1] Helen Cooper and Eric Schmitt, “Airstrikes by U.S. and Allies Hit ISIS Targets in Syria” The New York Times (22 September 2014). http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/world/middleeast/us-and-allies-hit-isis-targets-in-syria.html?emc=edit_na_20140922&nlid=68990308&_r=0.

[2] Helen Cooper and Eric Schmitt, “Airstrikes by U.S. and Allies Hit ISIS Targets in Syria”.

[3] Helen Cooper and Eric Schmitt, “Airstrikes by U.S. and Allies Hit ISIS Targets in Syria”.

[4] Heather Saul, “Syria air strike: Twitter user Abdulkader Hariri live tweets US Islamic State attack ‘before Pentagon breaks news'” The Independent (23 September 2014). http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/twitter-user-live-tweets-attack-before-pentagon-breaks-news-9749973.html.

[5] Heather Saul, “Syria air strike: Twitter user Abdulkader Hariri live tweets US Islamic State attack”.

Climate Week NYC 2014

‘U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announces U.S. plan to help fund new World Bank program to counter climate change (22 September 2014)’.

Also on Monday, 22 September, the Washington Post‘s Adam Taylor declares that this “week, the United Nations will host a huge and well-publicized one-day summit on climate change. The public is likely to be watching it closely: It comes just days after thousands of people in New York and around the world took to the streets, demanding more political action to help fight global warming. The climate summit’s organizer, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, took part in the New York march, and for Tuesday’s event, he is promising to bring together some of the most powerful people in the world with a common purpose. “I have invited leaders from government, business, finance and civil society to present their vision, make bold announcements and forge new partnerships that will support the transformative change the world needs,” he wrote in a blog post on the summit for the Huffington Post. It’s certainly true that the climate summit has an impressive guest list: More than 120 world leaders are heading to the United Nations in New York for the event, including President Obama and many big names from the private sphere. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio will give one of the opening speeches. But as impressive as that guest list is, what’s more interesting is who is missing. Notably, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are skipping the event. In empirical terms, it’s hard to think of two more important leaders in the world right now: Together they lead more than 2.5 billion people, more than a third of the world’s population”.[1]

 

 

[1] Adam Taylor, “U.N. climate summit is high-profile, but some of world’s most important leaders will skip it” The Washington Post (22 September 2014). http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/09/22/u-n-climate-summit-is-high-profile-but-some-of-worlds-most-important-leaders-will-skip-it/.

The Murdoch empire: Phone hacking exposed

‘An interview with Nick Davies, the reporter who exposed the British phone hacking scandal. He exposed one of the biggest scandals in recent British political history. Nick Davies, the journalist who laid bare a political controversy that reached into multiple British institutions and painted a picture of a news organisation so powerful that those institutions, including parliament, police and the rest of the British media, dared not take it on. Richard Gizbert sat down with Nick Davies to discuss the story, the power of fear and the future of the Murdoch media empire, which lies disgraced, but by no means defeated (20 September 2014)’.

Rojava: Syria’s Kurds

‘As Syria’s bloody civil war enters its third year, fighting has reached the country’s Kurdish-dominated northeast, a region until recently almost untouched by the conflict. The Kurdish PYD party and its YPG militia, which is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in neighboring Turkey, took over control of much of Hassakeh province from the Assad regime in the summer of 2012, and with it control of Syria’s precious oilfields. But the PYD’s hopes of staying neutral in the conflict and building an autonomous Kurdish state were dashed when clashes broke out with Syrian rebel forces in the strategic border city of Ras al-Ayn. That encounter quickly escalated into an all-out war between the Kurds and a powerful alliance of jihadist groups, including the al-Qaeda affiliates ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra. In September of 2013, VICE crossed the border into Syria’s Kurdish region to document the YPG’s counteroffensive against the jihadists, who had struck deep into rural Hassakeh in an attempt to surround and capture Ras al-Ayn. With unparalleled access to the Kurdish and Syrian Christian fighters on the frontlines, we found ourselves witnessing a bitter and almost unreported conflict within the Syrian war, where the Assad regime is a neutral spectator in a life or death struggle between jihadist-led rebels and Kurdish nationalists, pitting village against village and neighbor against neighbor (2 Jan 2014)’.

John Cantlie: Lend Me Your Ears

 

The Islamic State or ISIS: Its Deep Structure & Turkish Recruits

The New York Times reports that the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [now known as the one-and-only Islamic State, which according to the NYT is a ‘jihadist group (that) has oil revenues, arms and organization, controls vast stretches of Syria and Iraq and aspires to statehood’] has a detailed structure that encompasses many functions and jurisdictions, according to ISIS documents seized by Iraqi forces and seen by American officials and Hashim Alhashimi, an Iraqi researcher. Many of its leaders are former officers from Saddam Hussein’s long-disbanded army who augmented their military training with terrorist techniques during years of fighting American troops”.[1] The top is taken in by “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of ISIS [aka the Caliph Ibrahim, who] has two deputies. One is responsible for Syria and the other for Iraq”. And then there is the “Leadership Council: Mr. Baghdadi relies on a number of advisers with direct access to him. Members of this council help handle religious differences, order executions and ensure that policies conform to ISIS doctrine”; the “Cabinet” consisting of “[m]anagers [that] oversee departments like finance, security, media, prisoners and recruitment”; and finally, “Local Leaders” that “[a]t least a dozen deputies across Iraq and Syria report to the deputy of each country. Many of these officials were military officers during Saddam Hussein’s rule”.[2] The NYT lists Jasmine Opperman (Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium) and Hisham Alhashimi as sources. And the piece continues that the “group controls many of Syria’s eastern oil fields. In July [2014], ISIS fighters took control of the country’s largest oil field, Omar, which was producing about 30,000 barrels a day when it was fully functioning. Recently it was producing about a third of that or less. ISIS expanded its attacks into Iraq’s oil-producing areas in June, and an August sweep into the Kurdish region gave it access to more of the country’s oil assets. Experts estimate that the Iraqi oil fields under ISIS control may produce 25,000 to 40,000 barrels of oil a day — worth a minimum of $1.2 million in the underground market”.[3]

The NYT piece continues that, “[w]hen it seizes a city, ISIS keeps select services operating while using brute force to impose its vision of a fundamentalist Islamic state. Religious police make sure that shops close during Muslim prayers and that women cover their hair and faces in public. Public spaces are walled off with heavy metal fences topped with the black flags of ISIS. People accused of disobeying the law are punished by public executions or amputations. At the same time, ISIS keeps markets, bakeries and gas stations functioning . . . The Central Intelligence Agency believes that ISIS has between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters in Iraq and Syria and estimates that 15,000 of the jihadists are foreign recruits . . . The largest blocs of foreign fighters come from nearby Muslim countries, like Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. Smaller contingents come from countries as far away and disparate as Belgium, China, Russia and the United States . . . ISIS has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons and equipment from Iraqi and Syrian military installations. It has also intercepted supplies en route to Syrian rebel groups from foreign governments. Conflict Armament Research, a private firm that investigates arms trafficking, has tracked small arms and rockets used by ISIS that appear to have been provided to other combatants by Saudi Arabia and the United States . . . Among the weapons that Conflict Armament Research examined were M16 and M4 rifles stamped ‘Property of U.S. Govt.’ Such weapons are also in the hands of irregular Shiite forces in Iraq, where the United States provided hundreds of thousands of small arms to supportive forces during its long occupation . . . Conflict Armament Research found M79 antitank rockets from the former Yugoslavia that were identical to M79 rockets provided by Saudi Arabia to rebels in Syria”.[4] The NYT lists Conflict Armament Research and IHS Jane’s as the sources.

8 September 2014

Furthermore, the NYT reporter Ceylan Yeğinsu states that “[h]undreds of foreign fighters, including some from Europe and the United States, have joined the ranks of ISIS in its self-proclaimed caliphate that sweeps over vast territories of Iraq and Syria. But one of the biggest source of recruits is neighboring Turkey, a NATO member with an undercurrent of Islamist discontent. As many as 1,000 Turks have joined ISIS, according to Turkish news media reports and government officials here. Recruits cite the group’s ideological appeal to disaffected youths as well as the money it pays fighters from its flush coffers. The C.I.A. estimated last week that the group had from 20,000 to 31,500 fighters in Iraq and Syria. The United States has put heavy pressure on Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to better police Turkey’s 560-mile-long border with Syria. Washington wants Turkey to stanch the flow of foreign fighters and to stop ISIS from exporting the oil it produces on territory it holds in Syria and Iraq”.[5] In fact, Yeğinsu claims that the Ankara district Hacıbayram has become an active recruiting ground for the Islamic State, luring young and disaffected Turks into the ranks of the Caliphal Army. She quotes a local father, identifying himself by means of the letters T.C., as follows: “[t]he diluted form of Islam practiced in Turkey is an insult to the religion . . . In the Islamic State you lead a life of discipline as dictated by God, and then you are rewarded. Children there have parks and swimming pools. Here, my children play in the dirt”.[6] Right from the horse’s mouth, as it were . . .

 

 

[1] “How ISIS Works” New York Times (16 September 2014). http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/16/world/middleeast/how-isis-works.html.

[2] “How ISIS Works”.

[3] “How ISIS Works”.

[4] “How ISIS Works”.

[5] C. Yeğinsu, “ISIS Draws a Steady Stream of Recruits From Turkey” New York Times (15 September 2014). http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/world/europe/turkey-is-a-steady-source-of-isis-recruits.html.

[6] C. Yeğinsu, “ISIS Draws a Steady Stream of Recruits From Turkey”.