{"id":185619,"date":"2014-09-28T20:32:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T01:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/09\/28\/i-guess-that-the-word-khorasan-is-arabic-for-gulf-of-tonkin\/"},"modified":"2014-09-28T20:32:00","modified_gmt":"2014-09-29T01:32:00","slug":"i-guess-that-the-word-khorasan-is-arabic-for-gulf-of-tonkin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/09\/28\/i-guess-that-the-word-khorasan-is-arabic-for-gulf-of-tonkin\/","title":{"rendered":"I Guess that the word “Khorasan” is Arabic for “Gulf of Tonkin”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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<\/a> against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the \u201chomeland.\u201d<\/a> 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.<\/span>

<\/span> The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded \u201cThe Khorasan Group.\u201d After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat \u2013 too radical even for Al Qaeda! \u2013 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.<\/span>

<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> AP warned Americans that \u201cthe fear is that the Khorasan militants will provide these sophisticated explosives to their Western recruits who could sneak them onto U.S.-bound flights.\u201d It explained that although ISIS has received most of the attention, the Khorasan Group \u201cis considered the more immediate threat.\u201d<\/span>
\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> The genesis of the name was itself scary: \u201cKhorasan refers to a province under the Islamic caliphate, or religious empire, of old that included parts of Afghanistan.\u201d AP depicted the U.S. officials who were feeding them the narrative as engaging in some sort of act of brave, unauthorized truth-telling: \u201cmany U.S. officials interviewed for this story would not be quoted by name talking about what they said was highly classified intelligence.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> Orr then announced that while ISIS is \u201cdominating headlines and terrorist propaganda,\u201d Orr\u2019s \u201csources\u201d warn of \u201ca more immediate threat to the U.S. Homeland.\u201d 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 \u201cenhanced screening\u201d for \u201chidden explosives.\u201d This is all coming, Orr explained, from \u201dan emerging threat in Syria\u201d where \u201chardened terrorists\u201d are building \u201chard to detect bombs.\u201d<\/span>
\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> On September 25, the New York Times<\/i> \u2013 just days after hyping the Khorasan threat to the homeland \u2013 wrote<\/a> that \u201cthe group\u2019s evolution from obscurity to infamy has been sudden.\u201d 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:<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201caspirational<\/span>\u201d and said that there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works<\/b>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Literally within a matter of days, we went from \u201cperhaps in its final stages of planning its attack\u201d (CNN) to \u201cplotting as \u2018aspirational\u2019\u201d and \u201cthere did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works\u201d (NYT).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(emphasis mine<\/i>)<\/p>\n

What’s more, the folks at The Intercept<\/i> also noted that no one ever heard of the group before it was a justification for the airstrikes:<\/p>\n

Even more remarkable, it turns out the very existence of an actual \u201cKhorasan Group\u201d was to some degree an invention of the American government. NBC\u2019s Engel, the day after he reported on the U.S. Government\u2019s claims about the group for Nightly News<\/i>, seemed to have serious second thoughts about the group\u2019s existence, tweeting<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n


<\/span>Syrian activists telling us theyve never heard of Khorasan or its leader<\/span>
\u2014 Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) September 24, 2014<\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> by Peter Bergen. The other mention was an article in the LA Times from two weeks earlier<\/a> about Pakistan which mentioned the group\u2019s name as something quite different than how it\u2019s being used now: as \u201cthe intelligence wing of the powerful Pakistani Taliban faction led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur.\u201d Tim Shorrock noted<\/a> that the name appears in a 2011 hacked Stratfor email<\/a> published by WikiLeaks, referencing a Dawn article that depicts them as a Pakistan-based group which was fighting against and \u201cexpelled by\u201d (not \u201cled by\u201d) Bahadur. <\/span>

<\/span>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 <\/a>Time<\/a>: \u201cI\u2019d certainly never heard of this group while working at the agency,\u201d while Obama\u2019s former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said: \u201dWe used the term [Khorasan] inside the government, we don\u2019t know where it came from\u2026.All I know is that they don\u2019t call themselves that.\u201d As the Intercept was finalizing this article, former terrorism federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in <\/a>National Review<\/a> that the group was a scam: \u201cYou haven\u2019t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn\u2019t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan \u2026 had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.\u201d<\/span>

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

<\/span>So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda\u2122, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS\u2122. 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 \u201chardened terrorists,\u201d posed an \u201cimminent\u201d threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the \u201cfinal stages\u201d of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could \u201claunch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9\/11 attacks from 2001.\u201d” <\/span>

<\/span>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 \u2013 eager, as always, to justify American wars<\/a> – 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 \u2013 too secret! \u2013 but they, as intrepid, digging journalists, managed to unearth it from their courageous \u201csources.\u201d 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\u2019s impotent.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This sounds an awful lot<\/b> 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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1031,1051,986,1076,1173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-house-of-saud","category-hypocrisy","category-middle-east","category-terrorism","category-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185619"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}