Category: House of Saud

I Think that We Just Had an Outbreak of Sanity at Foggy Bottom

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In a major policy shift Secretary of State John Kerry has just specifically stated that regime change in Syria the US is not seeking regime change in Syria:

Secretary of State John Kerry pressed ahead on Tuesday in the effort to organize a new round of talks aimed at ending the Syrian civil war that could also align the United States and Russia more closely in strategies for fighting the Islamic State.

After an extended trip to Paris for climate talks, Mr. Kerry met for nearly four hours on Tuesday evening with President Vladimir V. Putin in the Kremlin, in talks intended to smooth differences over a planned round of Syria negotiations scheduled to take place in New York on Friday.

The United States and Russia have long been at odds over Syria, with Russia standing firmly by President Bashar al-Assad and the United States backing the rebels seeking his ouster. A previous attempt to broker a solution to the conflict failed, and it remains unclear whether the two sides will reach a compromise this time.

Among the issues to be decided in the run-up to the proposed talks is which of the dozens of militias fighting in Syria should speak for the Syrian opposition, and which should be designated as terrorist organizations.

On Tuesday, the diplomats said they had narrowed a gap on defining which Syrian militias belonged on a terrorist list. A final list may be ready Friday, Mr. Kerry said.

………

Mr. Kerry appeared, more carefully than on previous occasions, to couch America’s insistence that Mr. Assad leave office as a recondition of any settlement.

The United States, he said, was not seeking Mr. Assad’s ouster per se, but rather considers it unlikely that he could preside over a successful settlement.

“The United States and our partners are not seeking regime change in Syria,” Mr. Kerry said. Syrian opposition groups arriving for talks Friday in New York should not demand as a condition of sitting down that Mr. Assad depart immediately, Mr. Kerry said, a position Russia calls a nonstarter for negotiations.

“We see Syria fundamentally very similarly,” Mr. Kerry said. “We want the same outcomes, we see the same dangers, we understand the same challenges.” He added that the countries are “honest with differences.”

(Emphasis mine)

It’s nice that the US is finally distancing itself from the destructive and dangerous agenda of the House of Saud and the rest of the petty Persian Gulf monarchs, if only a bit.

Important

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Over at the New York Times, Kamel Daoud observes that Saudi Arabia is actually what ISIS intends to become.

This is particularly noteworthy because it appears in the New York Times:

Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.

Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.

The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.

One might counter: Isn’t Saudi Arabia itself a possible target of Daesh? Yes, but to focus on that would be to overlook the strength of the ties between the reigning family and the clergy that accounts for its stability — and also, increasingly, for its precariousness. The Saudi royals are caught in a perfect trap: Weakened by succession laws that encourage turnover, they cling to ancestral ties between king and preacher. The Saudi clergy produces Islamism, which both threatens the country and gives legitimacy to the regime.

………

Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.

I think that there is a slow change in attitude towards our “allies” in Riyadh, though it does not yet seem to have penetrated the psyche of the western foreign policy establishment.

Hopefully, this means that the Overton window has shifted, and our policy of blindly following the initiatives of the House of Saud will become a bit less automatic.

So, We are Selling Billions of Weapons to the Founder/Funder of ISIS

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I am referring, of course, to the House of Saud, who just inked a major arms deal with them, so that they can better bomb women, children, and hospitals in Yemen:

The US has cleared a sale of more than 10,000 advanced air-to-ground munitions for Saudi Arabia, a week after key allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) raised concerns over dwindling supplies of weapons.

If cleared by Congress, the sale, which could be worth up to $1.29 billion, would provide a wave of advanced munitions to a Saudi military that has been conducting airstrikes in Syria and Yemen for 13 months.

The contractor for the weapons will be decided by competition, according to a notice posted on the website of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.
Included in the potential sale are the following:

  • 1,000 GBU-10 Paveway II laser guided bombs (LGBs).
  • 2,300 BLU-117/MK-84 2,000 pound general-purpose bombs.
  • 4,020 GBU-12 Paveway II LGBs.
  • 8,020 BLU-111/MK-82 500 pound general-purpose bombs.
  • 1,100 GBU-24 Paveway III LGBs.
  • 1,500 BLU-109 2,000 pound penetrator warheads.
  • 400 GBU-31(V1) KMU-556 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) tail kits.
  • 1,000 GBU-31(V3) KMU-557 JDAM tail kits.
  • 3,000 GBU-38 KMU-572 JDAM tail kits.
  • 2,000 GBU-48 Enhanced Paveway II, dual-mode global positioning system (GPS)/LGB with the MXU-667 Airfoil and the MAU-169L/B computer control group (CCG) dual mode.
  • 2,000 BLU-110/MK-83 1,000 pound general-purpose bombs.
  • 500 GBU-54 KMU-572 laser JDAM tail kits, dual-mode GPS/LGB with the MXU-667 Airfoil and the MAU-169L/B CCG dual mode.
  • 300 GBU-56 KMU 556 laser JDAM tail kits, dual-mode GPS/LGB with the MXU-667 Airfoil and the MAU-169L/B CCG dual mode.
  • 10,200 FMU-152 fuzes.

The news comes just days after the end of the Dubai Airshow, where concerns over the depletion of weapon caches among the GCC states was a major talking point — one acknowledged by US Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James in public comments.

 Yeah, this is such a f%$#ing good idea.

Two Suggestions for Dealing with the Paris and Lebanon Attacks

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Three teams of Islamic State attackers acting in unison carried out the terrorist assault in Paris on Friday night, officials said Saturday, including one assailant who may have traveled to Europe on a Syrian passport along with the flow of migrants.

“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” President François Hollande told the nation from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”

As the death toll rose to 129 — with 352 others wounded, 99 of them critically — a basic timeline of the attacks came into view.

The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said the attackers were all armed with assault rifles and suicide vests. Their assault began at 9:20 p.m. Friday, when one terrorist detonated a suicide bomb outside the gates of the soccer stadium on the northern outskirts of Paris. It ended at 12:20 a.m. Saturday when the authorities stormed a concert hall, the Bataclan. One attacker there was killed; two others detonated suicide vests. Inside the hall, 89 people, who had been listening to a rock band, had been shot to death.

Meanwhile, we see very little coverage of what happened the day before in Beriut:

A fiery double suicide bombing terrorized a mostly Shiite residential area of southern Beirut on Thursday, ripping through a busy shopping district at rush hour. The Lebanese Health Ministry said at least 43 people had been killed and more than 200 wounded in the worst attack to strike the city in years.

 The Islamic State extremist group, which controls parts of neighboring Syria, claimed responsibility for the attack. The group portrayed its motives as baldly sectarian, saying it had targeted Shiite Muslims, whom it views as apostates. It mentioned almost as an afterthought that it had targeted Hezbollah, the Shiite militant organization that backs the Syrian government in the civil war raging next door.

 Hezbollah maintains tight security control in the district that was hit, and the bombing seemed aimed at hurting the group by attacking civilians in an area where it has many supporters. But the stricken area also typifies working-class Beirut, where Palestinians, Christians and Syrian refugees (mostly Sunnis) live, work and shop.

First, I think that we need to understand that this is state sponsored terrorism:

It is long past time for the oligarchies of the Gulf states to stop paying protection to the men in the suicide belts. Their societies are stunted and parasitic. The main job of the elites there is to find enough foreign workers to ensla…er…indenture to do all the real work. The example of Qatar and the interesting business plan through which that country is building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup is instructive here. Roughly the same labor-management relationship exists for the people who clean the hotel rooms and who serve the drinks. In Qatar, for people who come from elsewhere to work, passports have been known to disappear into thin air. These are the societies that profit from terrible and tangled web of causation and violence that played out on the streets of Paris. These are the people who buy their safety with the blood of innocents far away.

It’s been known for years that these regimes, in particularly the House of Saud, have been ATMs for the terror movement for decades.

To that particularly unsavory lot, we need to add our NATO ally Turkey, where the increasingly autocratic and delusional Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had decided to throw in for Sunni fundamentalist hegemony for his neighbor to the south, which is also his goal for Turkey.

Quiet diplomacy is not working with these folks. They need to be named, shamed, and sanctioned.

Additionally, changing the goal in Syria, and actively supporting the Assad regime as the best of a bad lot, which has the advantage of being true, and also has the effect of thwarting the goals or Turkey and the potentates on the Persian Gulf, and letting them know that they have crossed a line.

The fact that the Assad regime is that best alternative for the Syrian people and the world is a very real indictment of Western foreign policy.

This is About to Go All Pear Shaped

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Because their indiscriminate bombing of civilians has failed to secure “hearts and minds”, the Saudi led coalition is sending in ground troops:

An Arab coalition source confirmed to Defense News that 2,800 troops landed in Yemen on Aug. 2 and are targeting the country’s largest military base.

The coalition source stated that the forces — comprised mostly of Saudi special operations, intelligence and logistics personnel — are placed to secure Aden and take over Al-Anad military base north of Aden.

“The units are also supported by personnel and equipment from the United Arab Emirates and trained Yemeni fighters,” the source said.

Images of LeClerc main battle tanks, which are operated by the UAE land forces and Presidential Guard strike force, BMP armored vehicles, and M-ATVs being offloaded at a port in the southern city of Aden appeared on social media Sunday.

In what I am sure is a completely unrelated development, a suicide bomber struck a mosque inside Saudi Arabia near the Yemenese border:

A suicide bomber struck Thursday at a Saudi mosque used by security forces near the border with war-
battered Yemen, officials said, killing more than a dozen people.

The Islamic State asserted responsibility for the attack, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks online activities of militant groups. The blast follows a spate of suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia claimed by the Islamic State.

It also comes as Saudi Arabia and its allies have escalated their four-month-old war against rebel forces in Yemen.

The official Saudi Press Agency said that at least 10 security personnel and three workers were killed in the mosque blast, which occurred in the southern Asir region.

The House of Saud, concerned about nothing beyond their eternal war against the Shia, are actively aiding ISIS and al Qaeda by bombing their most determined opponents and completely unsurprisingly, ISIS uses this fact to further their campaign against the Saudis.

This has fail written all over it.

It Appears that the Only People Surprised with the House of Saud’s Ties to Terrorists is US Anti-Terrorism Agencies

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It appears that members of the US state security apparatus has literally described as “inconceivable” allegations that the Saudis gave support to terrorists:

Former top-level US intelligence officials have lined up to discredit explosive allegations by a convicted al-Qaida operative that senior members of the Saudi royal family supported the extremist network, and that a Saudi diplomat discussed plans to shoot down the US presidential plane Air Force One.

 Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker”, made the accusations in testimony filed in Manhattan federal court on Monday by lawyers for victims of the 9/11 terror attacks who accuse Saudi Arabia of providing material support to al-Qaida.

 Robert Grenier, the CIA’s former counter-terrorism chief, said Mousaoui’s allegations were “inconceivable”. A former top navy terrorism investigator, Robert McFadden, likened claims of official Saudi backing for the devastating attack to “a unicorn”.

 But the allegations – which came just a week after the US government made an ostentatious reaffirmation of US friendship following the death of Saudi King Abdullah – have once again focussed attention on the wisdom of Washington’s oil-fueled alliance with a leading exporter of Islamic extremism.

 Moussaoui, whose trial for his involvement in the 9/11 plot exposed a history of mental illness, echoed longstanding allegations that members of the Saudi royal family helped bankroll al-Qaida ahead of the attack.

 But he also made a dramatic new claim, alleging that he discussed a missile attack on Air Force One with a diplomat from the Saudi embassy in Washington.

It is telling that Mr. Grenier uses the term, “Inconceivable.”

He didn’t use the term, “fanciful,”, or “ludicrous,” or “ridiculous,”he used the term “Inconceivable.”

This choice of words is telling.

The House of Saud has a very long history of supporting Islamic extremism, both financially and through its policy of aggressively exporting local religious extremists in order to get them out of the country, but this “expert” cannot even conceive that they might have been providing aid to various flavors of Salafi (Wahhabi) fundamentalists who are tied to terrorism.

These are the words of a person who is fully immersed in denial, like the elements of FBI who arranged for charter flights out of the US for prominent Saudis immediately following the 911 attacks.

Saudi support for extremism is the elephant in the room among the US state security apparatus, and ignoring this fact is both required for career advancement, and cripples the anti-terrorism activities of those who do this.

It is clear that the House of Saud has bankrolled violent extremist groups, including ISIS, and it is even clearer that they use their money to promote religious schools and mosques that are the underlying infrastructure of Islamic terrorist groups.

I don’t care how much oil they pump, we need to stop looking the other way when they do this.

They are not our ally in this matter.

This is Not a Dilemma Unless You Let the House of Saud Make it One

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The collapse of the Yemeni government under the assault of the Houthi militias is a good thing for everyone but the House of Saud:

The American-backed government of Yemen abruptly collapsed Thursday night, leaving the country leaderless as it is convulsed by an increasingly powerful force of pro-Iran rebels and a resurgent Qaeda.

The resignation of the president, prime minister and cabinet took American officials by surprise and heightened the risks that Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, would become even more of a breeding ground for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has claimed responsibility for audacious anti-Western attacks — including the deadly assault on Charlie Hebdo in Paris this month.

The Houthi are Shia, and Al Qaeda is virulently anti-Shia, and if they take power, they will undoubtedly be an implacable foe of the terrorist organization.

This is not an issue for the United States.

In fact, a Houthi dominated government is likely to be better at fighting Al Qaeda, because they understand the genocidal ferocity of that group against Shiites.

The only people who should have a problem is the House of Saud, who have been applying pressure for years to ensure the complete disenfranchisement of Shiites pretty much everywhere.

Unfortunately, the US foreign policy establishment does not understand that their foreign policy interests are not the same as those of the Saudis.

Scholars in Pakistan Say What I’ve Been Saying for Years

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That the prevalence of terrorism in the Muslim world is largely funded by the House of Saud:

Federal Minister for Inter-provincial Coordination (IPC) Riaz Hussain Pirzada has accused the Saudi government of creating instability across the Muslim world, including Pakistan, through distribution of money for promoting its ideology.

Addressing a two-day ‘Ideas Conclave’ organised by the “Jinnah Institute” think tank in Islamabad, the federal minister said ‘the time has come to stop the influx of Saudi money into Pakistan’.

Now if only someone like a US Senator were to issue a similar condemnation.

It is patently clear that the font from which international Jihad springs is the pocketbook of the House of Saud.

They fund the schools where Jihadis are created, the social welfare organizations which they fund are Islamist, and they make a concerted effort to export their home grown nut-jobs to other Arab and Muslim nations, where they are some else’s problem.

H/t Emptywheel

Cue the Internecine Clusterf%$#

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The Saudi King, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, has died at age 90, and will be replaced by his brother, Salman ibn Abdilaziz Al Saud, who is 79 and is rumored to be suffering from dementia:

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has died at age 90, state television reported early on Friday, with his brother Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz succeeding him as the new ruler of the world’s top oil exporter.

 King Salman, 79, immediately appointed his half-brother Muqrin as his crown prince and heir, a move seen to avert widespread speculation about the path of the royal succession.

 State television said King Abdullah, who took power in 2005 after the death of his brother King Fahd, died of pneumonia. He was admitted to the hospital on December 31, state media reported at the time.

It’s pretty clear that Salman is a place holder.

It is tough to figure out what is going on in the mess that is the dynastic mess that is the House of Saud, but a year ago, I would a have argued that Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was next in line after King Salman, but seeing as how he has been the driving force behind backing the group now known as ISIS/ISIL/IS while trying to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, and it appears that he was fired from his position as Director General of Saudi Intelligence Agency as a result.

This sort of dynastic instability has does not bode well for the future of the House of Saud, which to my mind, is a good thing.

Well, I Missed this News Story

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Were any of the rest of you aware that a few days before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, ISIS managed to kill the Saudi general responsible for protecting the kingdom’s northern border against the terrorist group:

Last week, just before the Charlie Hebdo attack, ISIS sent a suicide team across the border into Saudi Arabia.  Here’s what happened.

  • The attack was successful.  The team found and killed the Saudi general (Oudah al-Belawi) in charge of the country’s nothern border zone at the outpost he was visiting (here’s a pic of the state funeral for some of the men killed in the attack).
  •  The target was significant.  General Oudah al-Belawi was in charge of the multi-billion dollar Saudi effort to secure the northern border against ISIS.  Not only has Saudi Arabia sent 30,000 additional troops to guard the northern border, it’s building a highly automated 600-mi security wall to protect itself (lots of robots and sensors).  Here’s a great graphic of the monstrosity from the Telegraph.  My take:  What a waste of time and effort. 

………

Here why this attack is signficant.  

  • It tells us that ISIS is starting to focus on Saudi Arabia –> with good reason.  The reason is that there’s simply no other way to unite the various groups under the ISIS banner.  ISIS, like all open source movements, needs to keep moving in order to stay alive (like a shark).  Right now, ISIS has stalled.  A jihad to retake the holy sites from the corrupt regime in Riyadh can serve as a simple plausible promise that can reignite the open source war ISIS started, on a global scale.

I can think of no better target for ISIS brutality than the House of Saud.

If this corrupt regime is devoured by the monster that they created, it would be poetic justice.

Unfortunately, it will be the subjects of that corrupt monarchy will bear the brunt of any conflict.

Finally, Someone Calls Out the House of Saud………

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Unfortunately, it’s the New Statesman, a respected but obscure publication, founded by Fabian Socialists and generally affiliated with the Labour Party, which has finally observed that Riyadh is the font from which Islamic terrorism springs:

Although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century.

………

As the so-called Islamic State demolishes nation states set up by the Europeans almost a century ago, IS’s obscene savagery seems to epitomise the violence that many believe to be inherent in religion in general and Islam in particular. It also suggests that the neoconservative ideology that inspired the Iraq war was delusory, since it assumed that the liberal nation state was an inevitable outcome of modernity and that, once Saddam’s dictatorship had gone, Iraq could not fail to become a western-style democracy. Instead, IS, which was born in the Iraq war and is intent on restoring the premodern autocracy of the caliphate, seems to be reverting to barbarism. On 16 November, the militants released a video showing that they had beheaded a fifth western hostage, the American aid worker Peter Kassig, as well as several captured Syrian soldiers. Some will see the group’s ferocious irredentism as proof of Islam’s chronic inability to embrace modern values.

Yet although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century. In July 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism, and yet the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, condemning IS in the strongest terms, has insisted that “the ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way”. Other members of the Saudi ruling class, however, look more kindly on the movement, applauding its staunch opposition to Shiaism and for its Salafi piety, its adherence to the original practices of Islam. This inconsistency is a salutary reminder of the impossibility of making accurate generalisations about any religious tradition. In its short history, Wahhabism has developed at least two distinct forms, each of which has a wholly different take on violence.

………

The soaring oil price created by the 1973 embargo – when Arab petroleum producers cut off supplies to the US to protest against the Americans’ military support for Israel – gave the kingdom all the petrodollars it needed to export its idiosyncratic form of Islam. The old military jihad to spread the faith was now replaced by a cultural offensive. The Saudi-based Muslim World League opened offices in every region inhabited by Muslims, and the Saudi ministry of religion printed and distributed Wahhabi translations of the Quran, Wahhabi doctrinal texts and the writings of modern thinkers whom the Saudis found congenial, such as Sayyids Abul-A’la Maududi and Qutb, to Muslim communities throughout the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, the United States and Europe. In all these places, they funded the building of Saudi-style mosques with Wahhabi preachers and established madrasas that provided free education for the poor, with, of course, a Wahhabi curriculum. At the same time, young men from the poorer Muslim countries, such as Egypt and Pakistan, who had felt compelled to find work in the Gulf to support their families, associated their relative affluence with Wahhabism and brought this faith back home with them, living in new neighbourhoods with Saudi mosques and shopping malls that segregated the sexes. The Saudis demanded religious conformity in return for their munificence, so Wahhabi rejection of all other forms of Islam as well as other faiths would reach as deeply into Bradford, England, and Buffalo, New York, as into Pakistan, Jordan or Syria: everywhere gravely undermining Islam’s traditional pluralism.

It provides a lot of insights into forces like Al Qaeda and ISIS, and makes it clear that the House of Saud, and that regime’s use of religion as a way to exert control and to promulgate a millennia long conflict between Arabs and Persians.

Saudi Arabia cannot be a part of any solution until they are forced to face the fact that they are the source of the problem.

They Don’t Want the Truth to Come Out, That’s Why

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More Escalation, and More Turkish Machinations

Turkey has the 2nd biggest army in NATO, and much of it is stationed a few miles from ISIS, but, much to the disappointment of the Obama administration they are refusing to take any actions at all:

As fighters with the Islamic State bore down Tuesday on the Syrian town of Kobani on the Turkish border, President Obama’s plan to fight the militant group without being drawn deeper into the Syrian civil war was coming under acute strain.

 While Turkish troops watched the fighting in Kobani through a chicken-wire fence, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the town was about to fall and Kurdish fighters warned of an impending blood bath if they were not reinforced — fears the United States shares.

 But Mr. Erdogan said Tuesday that Turkey would not get more deeply involved in the conflict with the Islamic State unless the United States agreed to give greater support to rebels trying to unseat the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. That has deepened tensions with President Obama, who would like Turkey to take stronger action against the Islamic State and to leave the fight against Mr. Assad out of it.

It gets better.

While refusing to take any action, Istanbul is demanding that the US put boots on the ground (see vid).

It’s pretty clear that Erdogan has been aggressively supporting the rebels in Syria, including some of the most extreme Jihadis.  (The so-called moderates could not fight their way out of a wet paper bag)

Turkey is reticent about taking action for a number of reasons:

  • They want the Kurds in Iraq and Syria to be neutralized as a military force that might ally with their own Kurds.
  • Erdogan is obsessed with replacing the secular regime in Syria with a Sunni one.
  • The Turks fear that if they go in on any operations against ISIS, their complicity in its formation will be revealed. 

I think that the last point is most of their concern wight now.

It’s why they went ape sh%$ over Biden’s comments regarding the Turkish role in the Syrian civil war.

Before ISIS was ISIS, Turkey and the House of Saud were the biggest backers of al Qaeda linked militants in Syria, and now that their little monster has become a potential threat, they are looking for plausible deniability.

Joe Biden Speaks the Truth

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So of course, he had to apologize for it:

A diplomatic rift between Turkey and the United States was patched over late Saturday after the American vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., officially apologized to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for remarks suggesting that Turkey helped facilitate the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group.

In remarks at Harvard University on Thursday, Mr. Biden said Mr. Erdogan had admitted erring in allowing foreign fighters to cross Turkey’s border into Syria, eventually leading to the formation of the group, also known as ISIS and ISIL.

Mr. Biden’s spokeswoman, Kendra Barkoff, said in an emailed statement that the two leaders spoke by phone on Saturday. “The vice president apologized for any implication that Turkey or other allies and partners in the region had intentionally supplied or facilitated the growth of ISIL or other violent extremists in Syria,” Ms. Barkoff said. “The United States greatly values the commitments and sacrifices made by our allies and partners from around the world to combat the scourge of ISIL, including Turkey.”

………

Mr. Erdogan, despite widespread evidence to the contrary, denied that Turkey’s long, porous border had enabled thousands of militants to cross onto the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. “Foreign fighters never crossed into Syria from our country,” Mr. Erdogan said. “They would cross into Syria from Turkey on tourist passports, but nobody can claim that they have crossed with arms.”

Seriously? How f%$#ing stupid do we think we are?

BTW, this is what Biden said:

Speaking at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Mr. Biden said allies including Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates had extended unconditional financial and logistical support to Sunni fighters trying to oust the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“President Erdogan told me,” he said, according to the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, “ ‘You were right. We let too many people through. Now we are trying to seal the border.’

“Our allies poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against al-Assad,” he said, including jihadists planning to join the Nusra Front and Al Qaeda.

I think that the appropriate response to Erdogan’s hissy fit is to tell him to go pound sand, which is why I would make a lousy diplomat.

He, and rest of the Sunni hegemonists were hip deep in supporting Al Qaedal linked militants, and Saudi Arabia directly supported what would become ISIS in their bid to overthrow the Assad regime.

The fact that this is not a part of the dialog about the US intervention in Iraq and Syria is a sign of just how completely the House of Saud owns our foreign policy apparatus.

I Guess that the word “Khorasan” is Arabic for “Gulf of Tonkin”

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Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain make a rather compelling case for The Khorasan Group being a construct of the Obama Administration to provide a legal fig leaf for dropping bombs on Syria:

As the Obama administration prepared to bomb Syria without Congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the “homeland.” A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.

 The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded “The Khorasan Group.” After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat – too radical even for Al Qaeda! – administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.

 ………

 AP warned Americans that “the fear is that the Khorasan militants will provide these sophisticated explosives to their Western recruits who could sneak them onto U.S.-bound flights.” It explained that although ISIS has received most of the attention, the Khorasan Group “is considered the more immediate threat.”
………

 The genesis of the name was itself scary: “Khorasan refers to a province under the Islamic caliphate, or religious empire, of old that included parts of Afghanistan.” AP depicted the U.S. officials who were feeding them the narrative as engaging in some sort of act of brave, unauthorized truth-telling: “many U.S. officials interviewed for this story would not be quoted by name talking about what they said was highly classified intelligence.”

 ………

 Orr then announced that while ISIS is “dominating headlines and terrorist propaganda,” Orr’s “sources” warn of “a more immediate threat to the U.S. Homeland.” As Orr spoke, CBS flashed alternating video showing scary Muslims in Syria and innocent westerners waiting in line at airports, as he intoned that U.S. officials have ordered “enhanced screening” for “hidden explosives.” This is all coming, Orr explained, from ”an emerging threat in Syria” where “hardened terrorists” are building “hard to detect bombs.”
………

 On September 25, the New York Times – just days after hyping the Khorasan threat to the homeland – wrote that “the group’s evolution from obscurity to infamy has been sudden.” And the Paper of Record began, for the first time, to note how little evidence actually existed for all those claims about the imminent threats posed to the homeland:

American officials have given differing accounts about just how close the group was to mounting an attack, and about what chance any plot had of success. One senior American official on Wednesday described the Khorasan plotting as “aspirational” and said that there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works.

Literally within a matter of days, we went from “perhaps in its final stages of planning its attack” (CNN) to “plotting as ‘aspirational’” and “there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works” (NYT).

(emphasis mine)

What’s more, the folks at The Intercept also noted that no one ever heard of the group before it was a justification for the airstrikes:

Even more remarkable, it turns out the very existence of an actual “Khorasan Group” was to some degree an invention of the American government. NBC’s Engel, the day after he reported on the U.S. Government’s claims about the group for Nightly News, seemed to have serious second thoughts about the group’s existence, tweeting:


Syrian activists telling us theyve never heard of Khorasan or its leader
— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) September 24, 2014

Indeed, a NEXIS search for the group found almost no mentions of its name prior to the September 13 AP article based on anonymous officials. There was one oblique reference to it in a July 31 CNN op-ed by Peter Bergen. The other mention was an article in the LA Times from two weeks earlier about Pakistan which mentioned the group’s name as something quite different than how it’s being used now: as “the intelligence wing of the powerful Pakistani Taliban faction led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur.” Tim Shorrock noted that the name appears in a 2011 hacked Stratfor email published by WikiLeaks, referencing a Dawn article that depicts them as a Pakistan-based group which was fighting against and “expelled by” (not “led by”) Bahadur.

There are serious questions about whether the Khorasan Group even exists in any meaningful or identifiable manner. Aki Peritz, a CIA counterterrorism official until 2009, told Time: “I’d certainly never heard of this group while working at the agency,” while Obama’s former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said: ”We used the term [Khorasan] inside the government, we don’t know where it came from….All I know is that they don’t call themselves that.” As the Intercept was finalizing this article, former terrorism federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review that the group was a scam: “You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan … had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.”

What happened here is all-too-familiar. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.

So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda™, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS™. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of “hardened terrorists,” posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the “final stages” of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could “launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.””

As usual, anonymity was granted to U.S. officials to make these claims. As usual, there was almost no evidence for any of this. Nonetheless, American media outlets – eager, as always, to justify American wars – spewed all of this with very little skepticism. Worse, they did it by pretending that the U.S. Government was trying not to talk about all of this – too secret! – but they, as intrepid, digging journalists, managed to unearth it from their courageous “sources.” Once the damage was done, the evidence quickly emerged about what a sham this all was. But, as always with these government/media propaganda campaigns, the truth emerged only when it’s impotent.

This sounds an awful lot like George W. Bush saying, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

This is the product of the imperial consensus that emerged following the fall of the USSR, with a dash of venality and mendacity from the House of Saud.

I cannot help but think that we are close to seeing the end of the American imperium, and that it’s fall will be not be pretty.

This is Unbelievably F%$#ed Up

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Two nights ago, we bombed ISIS.

We didn’t just bomb ISIS though, we also bombed a separate group, the Khorasan Group, which might, or not be affiliated with abhat al-Nusra.

The kicker is that Khorasan Group and ISIS are enemies, which means that we are bombing two opposing sides of the Syrian civil war:

On Monday night, the United States struck targets in Syria for the first time as part of its expanded air campaign against ISIS—a campaign that had previously been limited to the Iraqi side of the terrorist group’s border-spanning domain. But the anti-ISIS mission Barack Obama outlined in an address on September 10—”We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL”—had expanded in another way, too, as the U.S. launched strikes on a separate group in Syria that many Americans hadn’t heard of until recently. The Khorasan Group, which the president introduced briefly on Tuesday morning as “seasoned al-Qaeda operatives in Syria,” appears to be part of a faction that is actively fighting ISIS, meaning America has now bombed two opposing sides of Syria’s many-sided civil war. Has the military operation announced by the president only weeks ago already outgrown its original mission?

The Khorasan Group made no appearance in Obama’s speech warning Americans that U.S. airstrikes in Syria were likely. And it’s unclear what the group’s exact relationship is to al-Qaeda’s better-known affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, or even whether it’s a distinct entity. Regardless, al-Qaeda’s international leadership has disowned ISIS, and at the local level, forces associated with al-Qaeda have fought the group for territory. ISIS, for its part, has been blamed for assassinating senior al-Qaeda figures in Syria.

On the night that “kinetic action” began, we bombed two sides in a conflict.  (To be fair, there are 3¼ sides in the Syrian civil war, ISIS on one side, Sunni Jihadis on the other side, the Damascus regime on yet another side, and then the “Free Syrian Army”, whom I count as ¼ of a side)

And need I mention, the Sunni Jihadis, one of the sides that we just bombed, will be trained by the American military in Saudi Arabia, but we’re going to be really careful not to train the really bad ones.

This is so transparently a complete cluster f%$# that it positively buggers the mind, and we are not even a week into this.

Bush Used Phoney National Security Excuse to Cover Up For His Saudi Buddies

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I am so not surprised by this. There is a reason why Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saudr, is also known as “Bandar Bush” for his close ties to the Bush Crime Family.

We know that the Bush administration flew members of the Saudi royal family out of the US following 911, and now we know that they redacted all references to the House of Saud funding terrorism from the 911 report:

With relationships changing between the US and major actors in the Middle East, perhaps it is inevitable that the issue of Saudi Arabia’s funding of terrorism in the US is being revisited.
George W Bush in the Oval Office

Congressmembers Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass) recently got access to unredacted copies of the 2002 report of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) on 9/11. You may recall that 28 pages of that document had been redacted by George W. Bush for “national security purposes”. It has been widely reported that the 28 missing pages of the JICI report document a money trail from the Saudi Royal Family to the 9/11 hijackers.

‘I was absolutely shocked by what I read,’ Jones told International Business Times. ‘What was so surprising was that those whom we thought we could trust really disappointed me. I cannot go into it any more than that. I had to sign an oath that what I read had to remain confidential. But the information I read disappointed me greatly.’

This is no new revelation. At the time of the JICI report’s initial release, there was controversy about the extensive redactions and the information that was being withheld. Fourty-six Senators (all Democrats but one) signed a letter asking Bush to release the 28 pages. Bush refused.

The Congressmen Jones and Lynch (The Dem, Lynch, is also pretty right-wing, FYI) are doing their level best to say that Bush covered up for the House of Saud without actually revealing technically classified data.

I do not expect Obama do declassify this.

First, his actions over the past 5 years indicate that he has no interest at all in transparency, and 2nd, he is not sutpid, and he understands taht there is an implicit contract between him, and George W. Bush, and whoever is Obama’s eventual successor, that dirty laundry will not be revealed.

Just When You Thought that the House of Saud Could Not Get Any More Vile

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It turns out that they are sending death row inmates to fight in their war in Syria:

What is the role of Saudi Arabia in this proposal for a US military strike on Syria? It is not a question you will see asked much in the American media, but you should. Internationally there has been some coverage of the Saudi role, particularly the oceans of cash they’ve been lavishing on jihadist rebels for over a year. Rich Saudis like (now deceased) Osama Bin Laden and Saudi Intel Chief Prince Bandar are traditionally the biggest backers of radical Islamist groups in the world. President Assad continually noted in his interview with Charlie Rose that the Saudis were pouring their petro-dollars into Wahhabist Al-Qaeda linked rebels in Syria.

And now it is reported that the Saudi Arabian government is granting amnesty to death row inmates in exchange for them going to Syria to wage jihad.

Well, it seems some Saudi bureaucrats looked at the stalemate in Syria and came up with a way to think outside the box—and by “box” I mean “death row cell.” According to a story filed by A.I.N.A., an Iraqi Assyrian PR agency, the Saudi Ministry of Interior came up with a brand-new plague to inflict on Syria in 2012: “Let’s fly a bunch of death-row inmates over there and give them automatic weapons!” Seriously. Here’s the memo:

…we are in dialogue with the accused criminals who have been convicted with smuggling drugs, murder, rape, from the following nationalities: 110 Yemenis, 21 Palestinians, 212 Saudis, 96 Sudanese, 254 Syrians, 82 Jordanians, 68 Somalis, 32 Afghanis, 94 Egyptians, 203 Pakistanis, 23 Iraqis, and 44 Kuwaitis.

We have reached an agreement with them that they will be exempted from the death sentence and given a monthly salary to their families and loved ones, who will be prevented from traveling outside Saudi Arabia in return for rehabilitation of the accused and their training in order to send them to Jihad in Syria.

Please accept my greetings.

[Signed]

Director of follow up in Ministry of Interior

Abdullah bin Ali al-Rmezan

And we are on their side.

They are sending murders, rapists, and other criminals to fight for their Islamist forces in Syria, and we are on their side.

Think about that:  We are on their side.

You think that these guys care about the rules of war of the well-being of the Syrian people.

You know that everything is f%$#ed up and sh%$ when Putin is on the side of the angels.

A reminder:  We are on these guy’s side.

I Did Not See This Coming………

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Something else I did not expect, MoveOn’s ad on this is not lame

I did not expect the Russians to announce that the Assad regime have come to a preliminary agreement to place their chemical arsenal under in the control of foreign monitors:

Russia opened up a possible diplomatic solution to the Syrian chemical weapons crisis on Monday with a pledge to persuade the Assad regime to hand over its chemical arsenal to international supervision to be destroyed.

Russia’s new initiative was announced by its foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, hours after the US secretary of state, John Kerry, suggested that the Syrian government could avert punitive US air strikes in retaliation for an alleged chemical attack on 21 August, if it surrendered “every single bit” of its arsenal by the end of the week.

However, Kerry added that Assad “isn’t about to do it”, and the state department hastily issued a clarification saying that apparent ultimatum was “rhetorical” rather than a concrete bargaining position.

But Lavrov appeared to seize on the idea as a means of averting US military intervention.

“If the establishment of international control over chemical weapons in that country would allow avoiding strikes, we will immediately start working with Damascus,” he said.

“We are calling on the Syrian leadership to not only agree on placing chemical weapons storage sites under international control, but also on its subsequent destruction and fully joining the treaty on prohibition of chemical weapons,” Lavrov said after a meeting with his Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Moallem.

FWIW, the Syrians have appeared to welcome the proposal:

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s foreign minister on Monday said he welcomed Russia’s proposal that Damascus hand over control of its chemical weapons arsenal to international supervision to avoid US military action.

“I carefully listened to (Russian foreign minister) Sergei Lavrov’s statement about it. In connection with this, I note that Syria welcomes the Russian initiative based on the Syrian leadership’s concern about the lives of our nationals and the security of our country,” Walid al-Muallem said in comments carried by Russian state news agency ITAR-Tass.

I am not one to favor the “eleventy dimensional chess” bullsh%$ put forward by the Obamabots out there, but this is a welcome development.

I’m not sure if it is luck or design.

The tough part will be insuring that the rebels get rid of their poison gas.

The Assad regime cannot be comfortable with disarming without that.

Of course, that would unmask the House of Saud’s complicity in arming Jihadist rebels with chemical weapons, and I’m not sure that Prince Bandar bin Sultan would like to be labeled a war criminal.