The New Atlas : Syrian Rebels are Foreign-backed Terrorists

Latest terrorist attack in Damascus illustrates illegitimacy of both Syria's rebels & the UN/NATO backing them.
by Tony Cartalucci

Update: March 19, 2012 - It is now confirmed that Saudi Arabia is shipping arms to foreign fighters and Syrian rebels operating out of Jordan. The Australian reports in their article, "Bombs in Syria as Saudis 'send arms to rebels'," that "Saudi military equipment is on its way to Jordan to arm the Free Syrian Army," quoting an Arab diplomat. Of course, as reported below, the "Free Syrian Army" is led not by Syrians, but by NATO-backed Libyan militants from the US State Department-listed terrorist organization, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

It must be noted that Saudi Arabia in turn, receives its weapons and a significant amount of military funding from the United States.

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March 18, 2012 - A twin terrorist bombing in the Syrian capital of Damascus, allegedly targeting government buildings, ripped through a Christian neighborhood killing an estimated 27, mostly civilians. A third bomb exploded, killing only the driver of the car it was placed in, in what was apparently an attempted triple suicide bombing. CBS News reports (1) that after other similar attacks, U.S. officials suggest Al Qaeda terrorists "may be" amongst the Syrian rebels. However, while the West attempts to portray this as an unexpected development, we shall see that it not only was likely, but in fact the premeditated modus operandi of Western-backed destabilization efforts directed at upturning not only Syria, but the entire Arab World.

Pentagon's Premeditated Arab World Blitzkrieg.

From the beginning the United States has been directly behind the unrest in Syria. In fact, America's involvement in destabilizing Syria began years before the admittedly US-engineered Arab Spring (2) even unfolded in a premeditated plot to upturn the entire Arab World and reorder it according to their own corporate-financier and hegemonic geopolitical interests.

In a 2007 speech given to the Commonwealth Club of California (3), US Army General Wesley Clark would state that in 1991, then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz said the US had 5-10 years to clean up the old Soviet "client regimes" before the next super power rose up and challenged western hegemony. Clark claimed that this, along with the aftermath of 9/11 constituted a policy coup where Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other members of the of Project for a New American Century had hijacked US foreign policy to destabilize and turn the nations of the Middle East upside down - much the way they are now.

Clark would go on to say that shortly after September 11, 2001, while at the Pentagon, a document handed down from the Office of the Secretary of Defense indicated plans to attack and destroy the governments of 7 countries; Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Lebanon and Libya.

Clearly the United States has already "attacked and destroyed" Iraq, which in 2003 was invaded and subsequently occupied for nearly a decade at the cost of nearly a million lives including over 4,400 US soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, and trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. Likewise Libya was destabilized and invaded by proxy through a combination of US-led NATO forces and US State Department listed terrorist organizations including the (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (listed #27) lead by Abdul Hakim Belhaj.

Somalia has been the victim of repeated US-backed invasions by Ethiopia (4), Uganda, Kenya (5), and systematic air (6) and drone campaigns (7) carried out by the recently established US Africa Command (AFRICOM), while neighboring Sudan has been carved into two separate states, isolating the oil-rich south (8) with further intervention pending as public support is built by stunts including the fraudulent Kony 2012 video and George Clooney's pro-imperial intervention advocacy.

US designs toward Iran serve as a model for Syria.

Iran has likewise been under systematic premeditated attack for years, including brutal sanctions, and the training, arming, and funding of US State Department-listed foreign terror organization (listed #29), Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK) to carry out terrorist attacks within Iran, as well as the constant threat of unilateral attack by either Israel or the US, or both - all of which was described in minute detail in 2009 amongst the pages of US policy think-tank Brookings Institution's "Which Path to Persia?" report (9).

Which Path to Persia? .pdf
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In their report, they openly conspire to use what is an admitted terrorist organization as a "US proxy" (emphasis added):

"Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S. proxy is the NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran), the political movement established by the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American.

In contrast, the group’s champions contend that the movement’s long-standing opposition to the Iranian regime and record of successful attacks on and intelligence-gathering operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support. They also argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group’s supporters in the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering intelligence. The MEK’s greatest intelligence coup was the provision of intelligence in 2002 that led to the discovery of a secret site in Iran for enriching uranium.

Despite its defenders’ claims, the MEK remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group praised the decision to take America hostages and Elaine Sciolino reported that while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks, within the group celebrations were widespread.

Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacks—often excused by the MEK’s advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership’s main political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on Iranian civilian and military targets between 1998 and 2001. At the very least, to work more closely with the group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign terrorist organizations."

- page 117-118 of "Which Path to Persia?" Brookings Institution, 2009

It was also revealed in Seymour Hersh's 2008 New Yorker article "Preparing the Battlefield," that not only had MEK been considered for their role as a possible proxy, but that the US had already begun arming and financing them to wage war inside Iran:

"The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”

Seymore Hersh in an NPR interview, also claims that select MEK members have already received training in the US.

More recently, the British Daily Mail published a stunning admission in their report titled, "Mossad training terrorists to kill Iran's nuclear scientists, U.S. officials claim... but is Israel's real target Obama?" by "US officials" that Israel is currently funding, training, arming, and working directly with MEK. The Daily Mail article states, "U.S. officials confirmed today that Israel has been funding and training Iranian dissidents to assassinate nuclear scientists involved in Iran's nuclear program." The article continues by claiming, "Washington insiders confirmed there is a close relationship between Mossad and MEK."

Quite clearly then, the use of listed terrorist organizations is not an unfortunate or unexpected development in the midst of Western backed regime change operations - they are a central pillar in their planning and execution.

This leaves only Lebanon and Syria - Lebanon having suffered a brutal air assault by Israel (10) who ultimately failed to rout Hezbollah forces in the summer of 2006. Breaking the back of the Iranian-Syrian alliance that allegedly serves as the foundation of Hezbollah's strength would next be targeted.

The overthrow of Syria's government is a premeditated US plot.

A concerted campaign to isolate, destabilize and overthrow the government of Syria began in 2002, a year after Clark was informed of the Pentagon's plan to blitzkrieg through the Middle East. It was then that Secretary of State John Bolton added Syria to the growing "Axis of Evil (11)." It would be later revealed that Bolton's threats against Syria manifested themselves as covert funding and support for opposition groups inside of Syria spanning both the Bush and Obama administrations.

In an April 2011 CNN article (12), acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner stated, "We're not working to undermine that [Syrian] government. What we are trying to do in Syria, through our civil society support, is to build the kind of democratic institutions, frankly, that we're trying to do in countries around the globe. What's different, I think, in this situation is that the Syrian government perceives this kind of assistance as a threat to its control over the Syrian people."

Toner's remarks came after the Washington Post released cables (13) indicating the US has been funding Syrian opposition groups since at least 2005 and continued until today.

In an April 2011 AFP report (14), Michael Posner, the assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, stated that the "US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments."

The report went on to explain that the US "organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there," (emphasis added). Posner would add, "They went back and there's a ripple effect." That ripple effect of course is the "Arab Spring," and in Syria's case, the impetus for the current unrest threatening to unhinge the nation and invite in foreign intervention."

More recently, revelations that Syrian militants are in fact being armed, trained, funded, and even joined on the battlefield by Libya's Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a US State Department-listed foreign terrorist organization (listed as #27) (15) only further highlights the necessity of Syria's government under President Assad to attempt to restore order at all costs. The Telegraph would report in November 2011 (16) that LIFG leader, Abdul Belhaj met with senior leaders of the "Free Syrian Army" on the Turkish-Syrian border. It was reported that Belhaj was pledging weapons and money (both of which he receives from NATO) as well as sending LIFG fighters to train and fight alongside Syrian militants.

VoltaireNet.org would confirm (17) Belhaj and his LIFG's role in not just assisting Syrian militants but in fact leading them in NATO's armed destabilization of Syria.

US-led NATO and the UN are backing terrorists in the midst of military conquest disguised as "humanitarian intervention."

Now, with terrorist bombing campaigns targeting civilians and ripping through Damascus, we see just as it was planned for in Iran, the deployment of terrorist elements and tactics to bolster Western efforts to topple the Syrian government. The corporate media in tandem with Pentagon officials feign ignorance in an attempt to maintain plausible deniability before a public they assume are far too ignorant to have read or comprehended their designs articulated in documents like "Which Path to Persia?"

It is confirmed that the UN's casualty reports are based solely on opposition "activist" accounts and not on any verifiable facts. The UN's November 2011 human rights report was based solely on such accounts, recorded not in Syria or the surrounding region, but rather in Geneva. The report itself was compiled by Karen Koning AbuZayd who is concurrently a member of the Washington D.C. based Middle East Policy Council (18), along side current and former associates of Exxon, the US military, the CIA, the Saudi Binladin Group, the US-Qatari Business Council (19) and both former and current members of the US government.

Image: Just some of the corporate members of the US-Qatar Business Council, whose president just so happens to sit on the same board of directors of the Middle East Policy Center as Karen AbuZayd, co-author of the conveniently timed UN Human Rights Council report on Syria.

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Likewise, other "human right advocates" like Amnesty International are similarly compromised - Amnesty being headed literally by a former US State Department official, Suzanne Nossel, Executive Director (20). Nossel had just finished a stint as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organizations at the U.S. Department of State before being appointed as head of Amnesty (21). She was also vice-president of strategy and operations for the Wall Street Journal and a media and entertainment consultant at McKinsey & Company (a Council on Foreign Relations "founding" corporate member (22)).

Amnesty International also receives funding from Wall Street speculator George Soros' Open Society Institute (annual report page 8)(23) as well as the UK Department for International Development (page 8), the European Commission and other corporate-funded foundations.

Clearly "humanitarian concerns" are a disingenuous justification for continued meddling in Syria, with all involved notorious fabricators and harboring a staggering array of demonstratively conflicting interests.

With the addition of evidence proving the premeditated use of terrorist elements in the overthrow of sovereign foreign nations in US policy planning, the West's efforts, as well as those of their proxies carrying their agenda out on the ground in Syria, are exposed as illegitimate criminality of vastly unprecedented proportions.

References Cited

1. "Twin suicide bombers kill 27 in Syrian capital," CBS News, March 17, 2012
2. "2011 - Year of the Dupe," Land Destroyer, December 24, 2011 - citing New York Times article, "U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings," April 14, 2011, Ron Nixon
3. "Wesley Clark on America's Foreign Policy 'Coup'," FORA TV, October 3, 2007
4. "U.S. Support Key to Ethiopia's Invasion," USA Today, Barbara Slavin, January 8, 2007
5. "U.S. intensifies its proxy fight against al-Shabab in Somalia," Washington Post, Craig Whitlock, November 25, 2011
6. "US Bombs Islamist Town in Somalia," BBC, March 3, 2008
7. "US flies drones from Ethiopia to fight Somali militants," BBC, October 28, 2011
8. "Sudan: Future Oil Exporting Powerhouse?" NASDAQ.com, March 16, 2012
9. "Brookings' "Which Path to Perisa?" Land Destroyer, February 13, 2011 (links to original Brookings document.)
10. "Book Faults Israeli Air War in Lebanon," New York Times, Steven Erlanger, October 14, 2007
11. "US Expands 'Axis of Evil'," BBC, May 6, 2002
12. "U.S. denies support for Syrian opposition tantamount to regime change," CNN, April 18, 2011 (page 2)
13. "U.S. secretly backed Syrian opposition groups, cables released by WikiLeaks show," Washington Post, April 18, 2011
14. "US trains activists to evade security forces," AFP, April 8, 2011
15. "Foreign Terrorist Organizations," US State Department retrieved March 18, 2012
16. "Leading Libyan Islamist met Free Syrian Army opposition group," The Telegraph, November 2011