12/13/16

Aleppo: Tell Our Story After We Are Gone

By: Denise Simon | Founders Code

Update as of 2:24 EST, December 13, 2016, a truce and a cease fire announced.

The Syrian government has established control over eastern Aleppo, Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, told the UN Security Council on Tuesday. More from CNN.

It was October of 2016, that I interviewed Abdulkafi Al-Hamdo that is mentioned weeks later, today, in this article. He told me the same then, don’t cry for us, tell our story. You could hear the reckoning in his voice, his time on earth was short. (Segment 2) Barack Obama and John Kerry own this genocide and hence should be the mantle of their policy legacy.

Last Rebels in Aleppo Say Assad Forces Are Burning People Alive

As the Syrian dictator’s coalition captures the last rebel-held neighborhoods, residents are bidding the world farewell and opposition media says mass atrocities have already begun.

DailyBeast: Amid celebratory gunfire and cheers from Assad loyalists, foreign militias under Iranian command and troops loyal to the regime on Monday captured about 90 percent of the opposition-held areas of eastern Aleppo.

The last hope of the besieged rebels, most of whom seem to have withdrawn in the face of certain defeat, had been to receive reinforcements or resupplies from their counterparts in the southern and western suburbs. That option has now been foreclosed upon as these routes are completely interdicted by the regime.

The triumphal takeover of the citadel of the Syrian revolution followed a day of intense bombing of houses and apartment buildings, destroying so many that it was impossible to determine the death toll. The neighborhoods of Bustan al-Qasr, al-Kallasa, al-Farod and al-Salhin in the Old City, as well as Sheikh Saed, in the southern district, are all now under regime control.

The Syrian Civil Defense, or White Helmets, an internationally renowned team of first responders, said more than 90 bodies of people presumed to be still alive are under debris and that its volunteer staff reported they could hear the voices of children trapped in the rubble of their houses.

A member of the group in Aleppo told al-Arabiya TV on Monday night that men, women, and children were huddling and crying in the streets and at the gates of empty buildings in the few neighborhoods that remained in the hands of the opposition. He described the situation as hopeless, because precision munitions and indiscriminate barrel bombs had destroyed the city’s medical facilities, ambulances, and fuel supply.

Unconfirmed reports, circulated by opposition media, suggest that mass atrocities have already begun, such as the summary executions of 17 in al-Kalaseh neighborhood, 22 in Bostan al-Kasrand, and the immolation of four women and nine children on al-Firdous Street. The Daily Beast could not independently confirm these figures.

The official Syrian news agency SANA claimed that eight people were killed and 47 were injured in regime-held Aleppo after opposition fighters bombed the city. Most of the victims were women and children, according to the agency.

Activists and residents of the ever-dwindling opposition pocket, an urban islet of about five square kilometers and home to as many as 100,000 people, spent the day signing off from social media, asking journalists to tell their story, and warning of their impending demise.

The Daily Beast was able to get in touch with Abdulkafi Al-Hamdo, a university teacher in the besieged city. The brief conversation was as follows:

TDB: “I hope you’re safe.”

AA: “I don’t think I will be tomorrow.”

TDB: “Do you expect all the remaining besieged neighborhoods will fall by tomorrow?”

AA: “No. Except over the body of every civilian. I won’t surrender my body, and my wife, and my daughter to the Assad regime without defending them… I hope that you’ll tell everyone what I’m saying.”

On a publicly visible WhatsApp feed belonging to the Aleppo Siege Media Center, al-Hamdo was more fatalistic. “Doomsday is held in Aleppo,” he said. “People are running don’t know where. People are under the rubble alive and no one can save them. Some people are injured in the streets and no one can go to help them [because] the bombs are [falling on] the same place.”

Award-winning blogger and activist Marcell Shehwaro, a native of Aleppo, shared on Facebook a message from one of her most “peaceful” and least-sectarian friends. “No Marcell, don’t worry,” it read. “I will kill myself, I won’t let them arrest me.”

Lina al-Shamy, a 26-year-old woman, posted a video of herself to Twitter. Speaking in fluent English, al-Shamy said: “To everyone who can hear me. We are here exposed to a genocide in the besieged city of Aleppo. This may be my last video. More than 50,000 civilians who rebelled against the dictator, al-Assad, are threatened with field executions or dying under bombing. According to activists, more than 180 people have been field executed in the areas the regime has recently retook control of by Assad’s gangs and the militias that support them. The civilians are stuck in a very small area that doesn’t exceed two square kilometers. With no safe zones, no life, every bomb is a new massacre. Save Aleppo, save humanity.”

Jouad al-Khateb had a similar message—one hesitates to call it valedictory— for the world. In Arabic, he told the camera: “Behind me is the Bustan al-Qasr neighborhood. Since last night up to the present moment, it is being bombed with every kind of weapon; vacuum rockets, missiles. The rockets have not stopped since last night. The people coming out of Bustan al-Qasr are telling me it’s become a city of ghosts. More than 20 families remain under the rubble across various districts.” The White Helmets were unable to reach any of the victims, al-Khateb added.

“My message to those watching: Just stop the waterfall of blood for us. We don’t want to leave the besieged areas. Just stop the waterfall of blood. It’s as if this has become very normal for the international community, you know, a rocket falls, 20 or 30 people are killed, under the rubble, they can’t pull them out—that’s a totally normal thing. In any case, there’s no space for graves to bury them in. Let them be buried under the buildings. I think this will be my last video, because we’ve gotten bored of talking, bored of speeches.”

Al-Khateb was interrupted by a loud groaning sound.

“That’s a barrel bomb,” he said, referring to one of the regime’s most notorious improvised munitions, a metal canister filled with high explosives and shrapnel, which are dropped indiscriminately from helicopters.

Another trapped resident, Ameen al-Halabi, boasted on Facebook, “I’m waiting for death or imprisonment by the Assad forces. I would rather die on the soil of my land than be arrested by their faithless militias.” Al-Halabi asked his friends to forgive him if this was the last message he wrote.

On several rebel chat forums on the popular messaging application Telegram, there were calls for the youth of Syria to wage “jihad” against the conquerors of Aleppo, if only to defend the honor of women who had allegedly been raped in the course of the Assadist blitzkrieg.

Whether or not that particular war crime has yet occurred in Aleppo—though human-rights monitors have documented mass rape in Syrian regime prisons since the start of the conflict—the call for holy war against the regime may yet take hold. For this reason, the CIA and Joints Chiefs of Staff earlier advised the Obama administration that the fall of eastern Aleppo, apart from being a humanitarian catastrophe, would also constitute a counterterrorism threat to the United States. The radicalization of survivors is all but a foregone conclusion.

As for those already radicalized, they’ve had a remarkably auspicious week. While the regime was focused on reclaiming Aleppo, ISIS, or the self-proclaimed Islamic State, was able to completely retake another ancient Syrian city, Palmyra, which it had lost, to much international fanfare, last March.

Despite the gravity of the day’s events, and the many breaches of international law that led to the collapse of the rebel-held area, U.S. political leaders were slow to comment. President Obama has watched in silence as Russia and the Assad regime have committed what Secretary of State John Kerry called crimes against humanity, and Donald Trump has not once publicly mentioned the word “Aleppo” on his favorite social-media platform, Twitter, since being elected president of the United States a month ago. Kerry even meekly invited the Kremlin over the weekend to show “a little grace” in how it recaptured eastern Aleppo.

“The Holy Quran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as—it is as if he has killed all mankind. And the Holy Quran also says whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.”

So did Obama tell a receptive audience in Cairo, in 2009, in a much-scrutinized maiden speech of his administration. (The second line in this sacred allusion, as it happens, is also the mantra of the now-helpless White Helmets.)

The president who came to office promising to repair the breach between the United States and the Islamic world, putatively caused by the war on terror and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, is now set to leave office having done little to stop to the slaughter or displacement of millions in Syria or the wholesale destruction of one of Islam’s most venerated cities.

10/19/15

Ukraine Rebels Give Rise to a ‘New Cult of Stalin’

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

History is repeating itself in all its murderous glory in Russia. While the world swoons over Vladimir Putin taking charge in Syria and offing a bunch of blood-thirsty Islamists who are in his way and serve as bloody propaganda for his next moves into the Baltics, the Middle East and Europe, Putin is getting the old band back together a la the Soviet Union. He is using nationalism to stoke the hatred of America… blaming all of Russia’s ills on the US. You see this play out in Donetsk, Ukraine, where three giant portraits of the former Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, are proudly displayed in the center of the city. It is the rebel capitol of eastern Ukraine and separatists are fueling Soviet nostalgia there.

The young have no clue what a monster Stalin really was. They seem proud of the portraits and feel that they engender Russian pride. “I think the portraits of Stalin are a good thing. It’s our history and a lot of people have forgotten he even existed,” said Yekaterina, a 22-year-old student. Did you also forget the atrocities that Uncle Joe committed? Soviet customs are being revived to cement the rebels’ Moscow-backed rule.

The Stalin portraits feature a quote from the wartime leader: “Our cause is just. The enemy will be routed. We will claim victory.” Sounds a lot like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, doesn’t it? Under the glorified butchery of Stalin, approximately five million Ukrainians were starved to death in the Holodomor.

The Holodomor, or extermination by hunger, occurred in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1932 and 1933 and it killed an estimated 2.5–7.5 million Ukrainians, with millions more counted in demographic estimates. It was part of the wider disaster, the Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country. Scholars believe it was a long term plan of Joseph Stalin’s… an attempt to eliminate the Ukrainian independence movement. Actions such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement confer intent, defining the famine as genocide. The massive loss of life has been compared to the Holocaust. The horrors of Stalin’s repressions and the deaths of Ukrainians in the 1930’s due to famine caused by forced collectivization go unmentioned.

Vasil Kiseliev, deputy mayor of the eastern Ukrainian town of Stakhanov

Now, the rebels have become nostalgic for the good ole days of the Soviet Union. The Donetsk rebel leader, Alexander Zakharchenko, told AFP how he regretted the break-up of the Soviet Union. “The Soviet Union was a great country and it was a huge mistake that it was destroyed by the CIA and other secret services,” said the 39 year-old former field commander, who seems to have a thing for camouflage gear. “Europe and other countries were scared stiff of us.”

In eastern Ukraine, the rebel separatists have killed more than 8,000. In their offices, stylish posters of Uncle Joe adorn their dens. Stalin was a fascist dictator draped in Communist attire. The Donetsk rebels’ Deputy Defence Minister Eduard Basurin wears a badge with Stalin’s profile on his uniform.

A Soviet Union flag flutters as people attend the unveiling of a Lenin statue in the town of Novoazo.

At one time, the coal mining city of Donetsk was known as Stalino. In the early 1960s, the city was renamed after Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev seized power after Stalin died and vociferously and aggressively condemned Stalin’s cult of personality.

It’s a different story in Kiev’s pro-western government. Last May, they made it illegal to display Soviet symbols, just as it is illegal to display Nazi swastikas. They pulled down and destroyed Stalin monuments. They renamed streets, towns and establishments that had Soviet names. Lenin statues were toppled across the Ukraine, which incensed the rebels. The Donetsk rebels’ culture minister, Alexander Paretsky, condemned “vandalism and barbarism” while the leader of the Lugansk rebel region, Igor Plotnitsky, warned of a “moral genocide.” In the town of Novoazovsk on the Azov Sea, the rebels ceremonially restored a Lenin statue to its pedestal after taking control from Ukrainian forces.

Soviet symbols of the hammer and sickle in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol (AFP Photo)

This is the revived Soviet nationalism that Putin has brought back. That and the Russian Orthodox Church. In hearkening back to pre-collapse days, a fierce Russian pride of the motherland is being reignited. This is the new face of the rebels.

The rebels’ territories are called “people’s republics,” echoing the Soviet-era names of Communist satellites such as Bulgaria, Mongolia and Romania. Lugansk People’s Republic has a new emblem featuring sheafs of corn and a red star, just like those of the USSR’s communist republics.

The rebels are also bringing back the Soviet-era Young Pioneer youth group. Think Boy Scouts for communists.

A portrait of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin displayed in Donetsk, the rebel capital of eastern Ukraine.

I especially like what they have named their security agency… the Ministry of State Security or MGB. Does that sound familiar? It should… it’s the same name given to Stalin’s secret police from 1946 to 1953. And just to keep it authentic, if you are put on trial there, I wouldn’t count on an acquittal. Not in a Russian court. “It’s the Soviet model of the prosecutor’s office that we adopted in Donetsk,” said Andrei Spivak, the official charged with overhauling the system.

An additional exhibition of paintings pays homage to the Soviet hero “shock worker” Alexei Stakhanov, who achieved record coal production levels at a mine in the Lugansk region in the 1930s. Historians now see Stakhanov’s feats as carefully choreographed by the authorities as a propaganda tactic to push up norms. Always with the propaganda.

Young and old alike are romanticizing Russia’s past – remembering what they see as better, more prosperous times when they were a world power, as opposed to what has now become of Russia. If they can have that back, they’ll take the monsters with it. “Things were better back then. It was a totally different life,” says Galina, a 73-year-old.

With propaganda comes the whitewashing of history as well. In August, the Donetsk rebel authorities decided to pull down a monument to victims of the Stalin-orchestrated 1930’s famine in the Ukraine. Donetsk State University removed a monument to Ukrainian dissident Vasyl Stus, a poet and campaigner for national culture, who spent decades in jail and died in a prison camp in 1985 at the age of 47. “That was a criminal act,” said Maria, a pensioner — but her views seemed to be shared by very few.

In the last year alone, Russia and its proxies have begun a systematic campaign of harassing religious minorities in the Ukraine. The Department of State just released its annual report on International Religious Freedom. In it, it was noted that the conditions for religious minorities in the Ukraine and Crimea had severely deteriorated, thanks to the Russian-backed separatists. Those are the rebels. “In the areas they control, the separatists have kidnapped, beaten, and threatened Protestants, Catholics, and members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, as well as participated in anti-Semitic acts,” the report said.

Rebels declared the primary religion to be the Christian Orthodox faith of the Russian Orthodox Church.

From the Washington Free Beacon:

Armed assailants in Donetsk, calling themselves the Russian Orthodox Army, abducted Tykhon Kulbaka, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest, last July.

According to the report, “His captors reportedly subjected him to repeated mock executions and took away his medication, threatening him with a ‘slow death’ unless he joined the Russian Orthodox Church. He also sustained physical injuries before his release July 14.”

Donetsk authorities also detained Fr. Pawel Witek, a Roman Catholic priest, last May and accused him of being a sniper. The separatists blindfolded him, tied his arms and hands, and guarded him in a basement before eventually releasing him.

Other churches that were targeted include God’s Church of Ukraine, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, and a variety of Protestant denominations.

In a statement last July, the heads of the Evangelical Protestant Churches of Ukraine said that militants had subjected their members to “abduction, beating, torture, murder threats, and damage to houses of worship, seizure of religious buildings, and damage to health and private property of the clergy.”

One pro-Russian group also placed anti-Semitic pamphlets near the Donetsk synagogue and threatened to force Jews to register with a local commissioner and pay a fee.

Russia’s occupation authorities used “harassment, intimidation, detentions, and beatings” against members of minority Christian denominations and Muslim Tatars, the report said. Russian forces prevented some priests from entering their churches, raided mosques, and sponsored a new Muslim organization to supplant the local leadership body for Tatars.

In one incident last June, unmarked Russian forces stormed into a Ukrainian Orthodox Church and “verbally abused the parish priest and beat his pregnant wife and daughter, who suffered from cerebral palsy.”

“The occupation authorities refused to investigate the incident,” the report said. “The church was since closed.”

Authorities also denied residency permits to Turkish imams within the Tatar community and priests in the Greek Catholic Church.

Putin has an alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church. It is the State-sanctioned church. Of course he denies anything to do with all of this and the rebels. Here’s my shocked face… because Putin never lies. Meanwhile, Moscow has continued to supply the rebels with advanced weapons systems such as a multiple rocket launchers.

Russia is creating an illiberal coalition to oppose NATO and the West, a theory consistent with the rising tide of nationalism and Soviet nostalgia in Russia. In the end, this all leads to war, which is what Russia wants. They feel it will reinvigorate the Russian bear economically and nationally. Plus, they are just itching for a fight with the US now that her military has been gutted by Obama. They will use Syria as a springboard into the Middle East and as a doorway for seizing territory in the Baltics. Europe is on the brink of war and doesn’t even seem to realize it. Looks like Stalin is back from the dead.

08/11/15

Former DIA Director Michael Flynn: It was a decision to fund, arm ISIS

07/30/15

New Report Confirms Findings of Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB) member Clare Lopez believes that in 2011 Hillary Clinton’s State Department was orchestrating its own gun running operation to the Libyan rebels—and that arms dealer Marc Turi has been set up to take the fall for these “illicit arms deals.”

“The Justice Department has charged Turi with lying on an export-license application, alleging he hid his intent to ship weapons and ammunition to Libya in direct violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 170,” reports Jerome Corsi for WorldNetDaily.

“Marc Turi was set up and framed for something he didn’t do, while others, who actually did collaborate with Qatar and the UAE to deliver the weapons under U.S. and NATO protection and supervision, are not only not prosecuted like Marc Turi, they’re not even mentioned,” Lopez told Corsi.

“Lopez made it clear she was speaking for herself and not for the commission,” he reports.

Corsi has written several previous articles about the work of the CCB, which was established by Accuracy in Media back in 2013. “The commission has been working behind the scenes for the past two years to ensure Congress uncovers what really happened in the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans,” writes Corsi.

“Lopez [said the] ‘key point is that Marc Turi, despite receiving written approval from the U.S. government to broker weapons to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, never actually went through [with] any weapons purchases or shipments to Qatar, to the UAE or to Libya,” he writes.

Lopez referred to the Citizens’ Commission’s April 2014 interim report, which stated: “Even more disturbingly, the U.S. was fully aware of and facilitating the delivery of weapons to the al-Qa’eda-dominated rebel militias throughout the 2011 rebellion. The jihadist agenda of AQIM, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), and other Islamic terror groups represented among the rebel forces was well known to U.S. officials responsible for Libya policy.”

In fact, “The rebels made no secret of their al-Qa’eda affiliation, openly flying and speaking in front of the black flag of Islamic jihad…” states the report.

When Hillary Clinton’s Libya-related emails were released, they exposed how Mrs. Clinton was interested in arming the rebels before they were “formally recognized by the U.S. or United Nations,” according to Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne.

Fox News previously reported that Turi had said the “weapons supplied to Libya were in the hands of the U.S. government and the State Department’s Bureau of Political and Military Affairs, headed by key Hillary Clinton aide Andrew Shapiro,” reports Corsi. “Shapiro was responsible to oversee the export control process at the State Department.”

Mrs. Clinton exchanged emails with the Director of Policy Planning for the Department of State, Anne-Marie Slaughter, in the spring of 2011. On March 30, 2011, Slaughter counseled Hillary Clinton that she was “VERY dubious about arming the Libyan rebels.” When Hillary Clinton asked why, Slaughter argued that “sending more arms into a society generally… will result in more violence—against each other” and “adding even more weapons does not make sense.”

Yet Mrs. Clinton emailed her aide, Jake Sullivan, on April 8, 2011, that “FYI. The idea of using private security experts to arm the opposition should be considered.”

Years after the intervention, Libya remains a broken state marred by ongoing violence.

It’s already been established that Mrs. Clinton failed to turn over all of her work related emails, allowed sensitive and classified material on her private email server, and lied about both. Yet we are asked to believe that the more than 30,000 emails that she had deleted and wiped from her server were all personal emails. It’s clear that even her allies in the media are getting nervous about where all of this is headed, since she is the presumed Democratic Party standard bearer. The question is, will she ever be held accountable, and judged by the same standards as others who have “mishandled” classified information? And what about her role in the Libyan and Benghazi scandals? It is looking more and more like the only accountability may come from the American voters.

06/18/15

Napolitano: What If Obama And Hillary Are Hiding The Truth About Libya And Syria?

03/11/15

Why was Sid Blumenthal advising Hillary Clinton on Libya?

By: Kenneth R. Timmerman
Accuracy in Media

Exclusive to Accuracy in Media

Until Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) revealed last week that his Benghazi Select Committee was investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for her official State Department communications, no one had a good explanation for why none of the Congressional committees that had previously investigated Benghazi had ever cited a single Hillary Clinton email in their reports.

Congressional Democrats had been pooh-poohing Gowdy’s investigation, claiming that all the important questions about Benghazi had been “asked and answered” by previous committees.

Now the best that Gowdy’s counterpart, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), can do is object to subpoenas (especially when they are issued to Hillary Clinton in person, through Counsel), and to huff and puff about the investigation becoming a “surrogate” for the “Republican National Committee.”

What a change a single revelation can bring.

We now learn that Hillary Clinton not only used a private server, maintained at her Chappaqua, New York home for official communications, but that she never used a government email at all. Not once.

No [email protected], or [email protected] or anything of the kind. Just multiple accounts on her family server, clintonemail.com, including [email protected], the same address used by former Clinton White House aide Sidney Blumenthal to communicate with her on Benghazi and related matters.

Federal prosecutors recently finished up their case against former CIA Director David Petraeus, who was conveniently forced to resign just three days after the November 2012 elections, before he could clarify what he knew about Benghazi. (Given that Petraeus had just returned from a September 2, 2012 trip to Ankara, Turkey, where he had been trying to tamp down publicity due to an arms shipment from Benghazi to the Syrian rebels, he certainly knew a lot.)

In a widely criticized decision, they forced him to plea bargain one count of a misdemeanor in exchange for dropping more serious charges. The full extent of the FBI’s case against Petraeus involved him sharing personal, hand-written notebooks with his biographer.

Prosecutors noted that the CIA had installed a SCIF—a specialized high-security area—in his Arlington, Virginia home where he could safely store classified materials brought home from the CIA. That facility was dismantled by the CIA without incident two months after Petraeus resigned from the Agency.

The prosecutors never accused Petraeus of improperly storing U.S. government classified materials either in the SCIF or elsewhere. Nor did they accuse him of sending classified materials over an unsecure server.

If they could prosecute Petraeus on one count of improperly handling classified material (he kept those personal notebooks in a rucksack in his attic), one can only speculate how many thousand counts of mishandling classified information could be brought against Mrs. Clinton. Of course, she denies having sent classified information over her personal server, but in that case how did she communicate on classified matters with her envoys and subordinates?

Was the private server at her residence designed, installed, and maintained by a U.S. government security agency? Was it connected to the government’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) and physically separated from the open Internet?

The Sid Blumenthal memos, sent from his AOL account to Hillary’s private email server, suggest that this was not the case. If so, the former Secretary of State was breaking the law—big time.

When the memos first surfaced in 2013—posted to the Internet by a Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” —neither the State Department nor their purported author acknowledged their authenticity. Given that they initially surfaced on the website of Russia Today, Vladimir Putin’s reliably anti-American TV network, that was enough to consign them to oblivion as yet another Internet hoax.

Now we learn that former CIA official Tyler Drumheller apparently helped to gather the “intel” that Blumenthal sent to Hillary on the Benghazi attacks and other political developments inside Libya.

This is extremely significant because the initial memo sent by Blumenthal, dated September 12, 2012, cites “a sensitive source,” who purportedly met with Libyan President Magarief shortly after the attacks began and claimed that a YouTube video sparked the “protest” against the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

Magarief himself never said such a thing, although the memo is worded to suggest that he did. He blew up when he heard Susan Rice make that claim on the Sunday talk shows after the attack, as I write on pages 347 and 348 of Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi.

Drumheller became infamous for several earlier pieces of disinformation. As European Division chief at the CIA’s Directorate of Operations in 2001 and 2002, he was the one who planted the phony evidence about the Niger uranium contract that was later used by the media during the Valerie Plame affair to claim that George W. Bush had “lied” about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs. On three separate occasions, he passed the Niger information up the food chain as validated intelligence, when the CIA had been warned that it was not (see page 63 of my book Shadow Warriors).

Then-CIA Director George Tenet was so fed up with Drumheller that he spent seven full pages in his memoir debunking claims by Drumheller regarding the defector known as CURVEBALL that Tenet said were simply untrue.

Drumheller and Sid Blumenthal have a history together. In 2007, Blumenthal used Drumheller as a source to “prove” that Bush had “lied” about pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD. Drumheller and Blumenthal went on to work in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2007 and 2008.

So was the Guccifer/Blumenthal memo intended as disinformation, written after Hillary Clinton put out her statement on the night of the attacks blaming them on a YouTube video? Or was it actually the source of Hillary’s false claim about the video, written and sent by someone on the ground in Libya who was attempting to plant the story?

Many reporters, myself included, have submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the State Department, asking for all documents and communications that would show how Mrs. Clinton’s statement came to be worded as it was finally released. Where are all the drafts? Who commented on them? What did it say initially? How was it changed? By whom?

We have much of that information for the Susan Rice talking points, but nothing at all for Hillary Clinton’s statement on the evening of the attacks.

Given that there is not a single mention of a protest or the YouTube video in all the documents released to Congress, which included real-time communications from Tripoli and Benghazi from the State Department and CIA that night, exactly how Mrs. Clinton came up with that idea could provide key insight into what actually happened in Benghazi, and why.

02/19/15

Onward, to Defeat!

By: William Palumbo

Will America’s war against ISIS be the first we enter with the intention of losing?

On Tuesday, Breitbart.com carried an extremely salacious piece of news that, judging by the relatively small number of comments, went right over the heads of most readers. Reported Breitbart:

“The Obama administration is revamping its efforts to combat Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) propaganda. ISIS and its supporters produce “as many as 90,000 tweets and other social media responses every day,” reports The New York Times.

An empowered Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, currently a small component of the U.S. State Department, will spearhead the new campaign to fight the ISIS propaganda machine.

Rashad Hussain, a Muslim American with close ties to the White House, will replace Alberto Fernandez, the center’s director, according to The Times.”

The article goes on to cite several curious parts of Mr. Hussain’s biography that place him in close proximity to the Muslim Brotherhood. For the uninitiated, the Brotherhood is an international totalitarian organization which seeks to establish a global Islamic state (i.e., Caliphate) … just like ISIS, whom Hussain is supposed to be battling (in cyberspace, that is).

We’ll soon add some more color to Mr. Hussain’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliate groups in the United States, but first a few comments regarding the absurdity of social media “warfare” with savage headchoppers.

How Not to “Fight” a Fake War

It has been a surprise to many in America how well-produced, sophisticated, and professional ISIS’s media campaigns have been. Certainly, the influx of western jihadis have given them sufficient talent and technological know-how to put together their slick slaughter videos and catchy Twitter memes. Lest you forget about their savagery for even a day, the news media and Twitter will shove it right back into your face.

Which, considering our government’s capabilities, raises more than a few questions about the actual strategy to defeat ISIS. The U.S. government and social media platforms are masters at censorship. Post something highly offensive on Facebook or on Twitter and these companies will, more likely than not, remove it. There is photo recognition software that surely can be programmed to detect severed heads and black Shahada flags, and immediately flag them (no pun intended) for review. And there are a thousand ways that government internet monitoring can track activity online and cripple the user. Just ask Edward Snowden. Just ask Sharyl Attkisson.

Finally, remember that Facebook Turkey recently conceded to censor Turkish citizens who criticized Islam (and, more than likely, their fascist leaders, Recep Erdogan).

In conclusion, if Obama and the geniuses who are allegedly fighting ISIS were serious about winning the cyberwar, they’d just implement the tools we all know they have at their (literal) fingertips and shut them down. But they don’t.

Of course, if the same people were serious about winning the actual war (read: killing ISIS, not retweeting them to death), they’d also be doing just that. Instead, they’ve been ordering air strikes that have been described as “pin-pricks” since August, and while they dither ISIS has gained control of massive amounts of additional territory in Syria.

Deliberately Surrendering to the Headchoppers and Child Killers

All of this begs the question, what is the Obama administration doing with ISIS? It should be remembered that this same administration armed and trained Syrian rebels in Qatar. Only then did the world get “ISIS.”

This brings us back to Obama’s new propaganda chief against ISIS, Rashad Hussain. As noted by Breitbart, in December 2013 the Egyptian political magazine Rose El-Yousef profiled Hussain as one of six Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators in the Obama administration. At the time, the Investigative Project on Terrorism wrote of Hussain that he “maintained close ties with people and groups that [Rose El-Yousef] says comprise the Muslim Brotherhood network in America.”

That’s an understatement.

Here’s a healthy dose of facts pertaining to Hussain’s role in the Obama administration and his association with Muslim Brotherhood organizations in the United States:

Hussain was appointed Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Countries by Obama in February 2010.
In 2013, Hussain met with Abdullah Bin Bayyah at the White House. Bayyah is a Vice President of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS). IUMS is headed by Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is banned from entering the United States.
In 2013, Hussain was a Forum Speaker at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, held in Doha, Qatar. This event is co-hosted by the Brookings Saban Center, and the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In 2012, Hussain attended the U.S.-Islamic World Conference in Doha, Qatar. With him were future Presidential Chief-of-Staff Denis McDonough, Imam Mohamed Magid (President of the Islamic Society of North America, ISNA), and Sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah.
In May 2009, Mr. Hussain was one of the speakers at a Leadership Summit of the Council for Advancement of Muslim Professionals (CAMP). Many of the sponsoring organizations of that event are tied to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood including Islamic Relief, Amana Mutual Funds, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. (From GlobalMBWatch.com)
In 2008, Hussain co-authored a paper for the Brookings Institution, Reformulating the Battle of Ideas: Understanding the Role of Islam in Counterterrorism Policy. This paper explicitly calls for the American government not to reject political Islam, but to utilize Islamic scholars and Islamic “policymaking” to reject “terrorism.” It also recommends that “policymakers should reject the use of language that provides a religious legitimization of terrorism such as ‘Islamic terrorism’ and ‘Islamic extremist.’” (Brookings has taken millions of dollars from the Muslim Brotherhood government of Qatar.)
In 2004, Hussain spoke at a Muslim Students Association’s (MSA) conference in Chicago. There he defended Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian activist who had been indicted by the Department of Justice for racketeering, calling it a “politically motivated persecution.”

Dissembling and Procrastination from Obama and his Puppets

In October, former CIA Chief and Secretary of Defense (both positions held under Obama) Leon Panetta expressed what should have been treated as an incredible opinion. The war against ISIS, Panetta stated, would be a “30-year war.”

Let’s state the obvious: if you’re planning a 30-year war, are you planning victory, or a prolonged, dragged out, and humiliating defeat? The Nazis were defeated in much less than 30 years’ time, and ISIS right now is no German Wehrmacht. Not even close… not yet, anyway.

That stupefying statement by an Obama-appointed public figure, as unbelievable as it was, was actually trumped this week by State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf. Harf, speaking after the world had recently witnessed the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot and the mass beheadings of Coptic Christians in Libya, claimed that the United States could “not kill ourselves out of his war. We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it is lack of opportunity for jobs.” ISIS certainly seems to believe they can kill themselves out of this war, whether the murdered are men, women, or children.

But not according to the U.S. Department of State. Instead, to defeat ISIS, Libyans need jobs (or something, right Ms. Harf?). This is just too ironic, considering that the Obama administration is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and there are a record number of Americans long-term out of work.

How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jihad

Americans aren’t all that familiar with Islam, jihad, honor killings, or the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the most recent U.S. Census, less than one million people in the United States speak Arabic at home.

So, maybe it makes sense to listen to the government of Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, when it states publicly that ISIS is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. The shock value here is minimized when one remembers that Al Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram, and the Taliban are all Muslim Brotherhood spinoffs.

Then again, other spinoffs of the Brotherhood include CAIR, ISNA, MPAC, and the MSA. Rashad Hussain, the chief architect of a bogus cyberwar strategy against ISIS, is a well-known associate of these groups going back more than a decade. It’s a matter of public record.

Not even in 30 years will this “strategy” defeat ISIS. It’s not designed to. It’s designed to defeat us.

As an infamous 1991 memo of the Muslim Brotherhood stated, “The Ikhwan (i.e., Muslim Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Obama consistently defends Islam, yet has no problem lecturing Americans about the Crusades (which ended long before Columbus sailed to the Americas). If we the people don’t get serious about stopping this modern day jihad soon, the sabotage from within will soon be complete.