Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Who ordered the bombings?


Within the space of three of four days we have seen two terrible aerial attacks in Syria. In the first, over the weekend, planes of the US and its allies attacked Syrian forces in Deir Azzor where they were under siege by ISIS fighters. In the second, yesterday, planes attacked UN aid convoys carrying relief supplies to the besieged inhabitants of Alleppo.  Over 60 Syrian soldiers were killed in the first attack and over 20 people were reported killed in the aid convoy attack.

What was the purpose of these attacks and who ordered them?

We know who carried out the Deir Azzor attack. The US, Australia, Denmark and the UK have admitted that it was planes of their countries that carried out the bombing. The US claimed it was an error made in the heat of battle and that the intended target was ISIS. There was a public apology. Nevertheless to see US Ambassador Samantha Power walking out of the UN Security Council meeting when Russia brought up the bombing, and then dismiss her Russian counterpart's action as a 'stunt' was truly sickening. She expressed no signs of remorse and no recognition that planes of foreign nations had attacked the troops of a sovereign nation on its own territory. And she is a diplomat? It is said that she is hoping for a senior position in a Hillary Clinton administration. God help us.

Does the US claim of a tragic accident hold up?

There is a tendency for armchair pundits, like myself, to see the war as a conflict between various 'players' like the Syrian Government, ISIS, the USA, Russia, Al Nusra etc. and then to ask which players were responsible and what did they stand to gain. But this is probably too simple a way of looking at things, in that each of these players comprises a number of factions many with their own agendas. With the chaos that is prevailing in Syria it is easy for any faction to act without official approval from those nominally overseeing it.

This I suspect is what happened in the US strike on the Syrian army at Deir Azzor. It seems unlikely that it was an accident - the Syrian troops were at an army base and airfield which has been in Government hands for months. Furthermore within ten minutes of the strike ISIS troops moved in to attack the base. From the outside it looks like a coordinated attack on the government troops holding the airfield. To believe the official Washington story (that it was an accident) one would have to believe that the US powers of reconnaissance and intelligence were particularly inept and they couldn't distinguish between troops holding a base (where they had been under siege for months) and their attackers.

It seems hard to believe that President Obama would have ordered such a strike, which aided ISIS, seeing how Donald Trump has accused him of being a founder of ISIS and seeing also how much time and effort Secretary of State John Kerry had put into negotiating a truce with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.

So what happened? I suspect it was the US military acting without approval from the White House. Whether they would have had the approval of Defence Secretary, Ash Carter, is not clear, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that they did. After all Carter had fought Kerry tooth and nail to prevent such a deal with Russia.  Many in the military are known to have had serious reservations about cooperating with the Russian military in going after ISIS, which was supposed to happen after the cease-fire had held for a week.

Seen from this perspective, the act of bombing Syrian troops seems like a attempt to sabotage the cease-fire deal, and at the same time deal a blow to the Assad regime. It also lent support to the terror groups which have been receiving arms and assistance for some time from US agencies or its proxies. The CIA has reportedly been heavily involved in this.

It is perhaps tragically ironic that the cease-fire would probably have collapsed without this murderous attack, which has made the US look very bad in the eyes of the world. One of the conditions of the cease-fire was that the so-called "moderate opposition" fighters had to separate themselves from the Nusra brigades. That wasn't going to happen. If there were indeed any moderate opposition groups in Alleppo, there is no way that the Nusra terrorists would have allowed them to leave, or separate, even if the moderates had wanted to. If East Alleppo was seen to have been cleared of non-jihadi forces, then there would be nothing to stop their enemies from increasing their bombing until no living being remained.

I find it interesting too that Australian, British and Danish planes were involved in the attack along with US ones. By implicating these allies in the bombing, the chance of condemnation from their governments was lessened. Whether the military commanders of these forces in Syria had any idea of whom they are attacking is an interesting question. I doubt if their governments knew, especially given that White House probably didn't know. I imagine there was a lot of people being bawled out over the phones this past weekend.

French planes were not involved. Maybe they weren't invited. After the ISIS attacks in Paris it would have put the French government in a very uncomfortable position if it was seen to be aiding ISIS.

Turning now to the bombing of the aid convoys. Both the Syrian Air Force and the Russian Air Force have been accused. Both have denied it. The US has claimed that the raid was a sophisticated 'double strike' in which the planes returned for a second time to attack the rescuers who had come to the aid of the injured after the first attack. This, it was claimed, pointed to a Russian action, with the implied suggestion that poor dumb Arabs couldn't coordinate anything so sophisticated.   

On this one there are accusations but apparently very little evidence one way or another.  Again it could be a rogue element or a faction in the Syrian or Russian militaries.  But I somehow doubt that would happen in the Russian military.  Anyone who undertook such an action without President Putin's approval would find themselves in a very sticky position.  I imagine senior officers in the Syrian Air Force would have more leeway.  After all Assad's continuation in power depends upon the support of his military.  Terrible hatreds must have built up over the past five years of fighting and I find it quite plausible that some air force officers, perhaps believing that weapons were coming in along with humanitarian aid, might decide that such a convoy was fair game. It is despicable and no doubt a war crime.  

The morass seems to be deepening.  Turkey has increased its incursion and now plans to hold a strip of land 30 kms. wide from its border, which will take its forces close to Aleppo.   This is nothing short of an invasion of another sovereign country.  Meanwhile US, NATO and Gulf State countries violate sovereignty by bombing at will.  It is true that Russia is bombing and that Iran has forces on the ground in Syria, but these were invited in by the internationally recognized government of Syria.  Not so the other parties.  

It seems likely that the two recent aerial bombings were not authorized from the top. So in trying to make sense of this cruel and senseless war it seems we have not only to consider the numerous main players - the Syrian Government, ISIS, Nusra, US, NATO, Russia, Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Iran, the Kurds etc.but also factions within the players - Pentagon, CIA, State Dept. for US and no doubt similar factions within the Russian and Turkish militaries and who knows what within the various irregular groups.
But I imagine there is a one big difference between, on the one hand, the US and on the other Russia and Turkey. In the latter two cases any faction violating the overall strategy of the Czar or Sultan would be quickly removed. Not so in the US it seems. Unless of course we find that Ash Carter is replaced as Secretary of Defence the near future.



Thursday, September 15, 2016

Conspiracies and False Flags.


I have been accused of being a "conspiracy theorist" on many occasions.  Such an accusation is an easy way of shutting down an argument.  And indeed shutting down or deflecting investigation was the intention of those who coined the term "conspiracy theory".  And who might benefit from shutting down discussion of the "official" narrative of a military, criminal or terrorist incident?  Well it was the CIA who coined the term "conspiracy theory" as the following report and facsimile of a 1967 dispatch reveals:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-23/1967-he-cia-created-phrase-conspiracy-theorists-and-ways-attack-anyone-who-challenge

So I am off and running with a conspiracy about using the term "conspiracy theory"!

But really if one looks at the historical record of "momentous" incidents that have led to war or to a government grabbing extraordinary powers, it appears that in many incidents they have been "false flag" operations created for the purpose of justifying a war of aggression or the seizure of extraordinary powers.  The following website gives a list of 53 such false flag operations, for which it claims "officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admits to it, either orally or in writing."  It provides links (most of which I haven't checked out) for the sources.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/02/x-admitted-false-flag-attacks.html


It seems most major powers have used this technique, often with immediate success, although the truth eventually seems to leak out, although of course there may be false flag incidents for which the official narrative has gone unrefuted.   Some example given include: 



  • the Soviet Union shelling one of its own villages, Mainila, and blaming it on Finland, thereby justifying the Soviet invasion of Finland in what became the "Winter War" of 1939 (Item 4);                                                   
  • the "Mukden Incident"  in which the Japanese military set off an explosion on a railway track in Manchuria in 1931 and blamed it on the Chinese.  Japan used the incident as a justification for the occupation of Manchuria (Item 1);                                                                                                                                
  • the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident".  It was claimed that on two occasions, two days apart, in 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats fired on an American destroyer the USS Maddox.  It transpires that the second attack was completely fabricated, and that in the first attack, according to the Pentagon Papers,  it was the Maddox which fired first on the N. Vietnamese ships.  This incident led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, in Congress, which President Lyndon Johnson used as a legal justification for sending troops to fight a war against N. Vietnam (Item 27)


  • In 1957 British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and US President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion of Syria by its two pro-western neighbours, and then to topple the regime in Damascus (Regime change in Syria - we have form!) (Item 10).  


This last one was a failure it seems, as was the following fiasco in Basra, Iraq, in 2005, when British soldiers dressed as Arabs were arrested by Iraqi police and found to be carrying explosives. While the soldiers never explained what they were up to, the fact that the British Army send tanks to release them by breaking down a wall of the prison in which they were being held, seems to suggests that they were doing something nefarious and that the British authorities didn't want them admitting to anything.

In one event listed (Item 3), the Reichstag fire, the identity of the perpetrators is still being debated.  At the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi general Franz Halder testified that Herman Goering admitted that the Nazis were behind setting the fire, which destroyed the German parliament buildings.  Conveniently a young Dutch communist was found at the scene with firelighters and other suspicious material.  He was put on trial, found guilty and executed.  The morning after the fire the cabinet, which still had a non-Nazi majority, met to draw up an emergency decree that abrogated civil liberties across Germany. It abolished freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and association, and freedom of the press.  Communists and other opponents of the Nazis were quickly rounded up.  Clearly lists had been prepared in advance, just as in the recent arrests and purges which took place in Turkey following the failed coup in July.   

It was widely believed that the Reichstag fire was a false flag operation carried out by the Nazis, but in the post-war period there has been claims that the fire really was set by the Dutchman acting alone.  This has led to a lively debate among historians.  The issue is discussed in this well-written review of the book, Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery, by the Cambridge historian Richard Evans.  

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n09/richard-j-evans/the-conspiracists


The  Mainila, Mukden and Gulf of Tonkin incidents led to serious wars. Also Mussolini justified his 1940 invasion of Greece on violence carried out on the  Greek-Albanian (Italian occupied) border - a false flag operation carried out by Italians.  And we all know of the allegations made by Dick Cheney and others, that Iraq was sponsor of 9-11.  So these false-flag conspiracies have had major detrimental consequences.  

And then there was Suez Crisis of 1956, when following Israeli incursions into Egypt, the governments of Britain and France called for both Israel and Egypt to cease fighting and withdraw ten miles from the Suez Canal.   When they did not do this the two European powers sent in their own armed forces to "protect the canal".  But in fact it had all been planned in advance.  The Protocol of Sevres was a secret agreement between the governments of Britain, France and Israel, to invade Egypt, in exactly the way that it happened, with (from the British and French side) the aim of toppling the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and seizing control of the canal which Nasser had nationalized.

So, looking at the historical record, considering a conspiracy, especially a false flag one, as being behind some world-changing events, seems to me a very rational approach.  Of course not everything is a conspiracy - never discount the power of cock-ups!  And some conspiracy hypotheses are clearly nonsense. (Elvis was not abducted by aliens and Neil Armstrong probably did walk on the moon!) But with 9-11 for example there are so many unanswered questions and evidence inconsistent with the official narrative, that the hypothesis of a conspiracy being behind it deserves serious scrutiny.  This comment from a former Washington insider (Paul Craig Roberts) struck me as telling:


From my quarter century in Washington, it is clear to me that if such an event as 9/11 had actually happened for the reason given, the White House, Congress, and media would have been screaming for explanation of how a few Arabs outwitted the entire US National Security State—all 16 US intelligence agencies, the security agencies of Washington’s NATO allies and Israel, the National Security Council, Air Traffic Control, and airport security four times in one hour on the same day.  Instead the government refused any inquiry for one year until most of the evidence was destroyed.

Conspiracies do happen - more often than we would like to believe.  So the next time anybody accuses me of being a conspiracy theorist, I am going to point them to the historical record of conspiracies and call them a "conspiracy denier" or maybe just a patsy!