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Newly revealed documents show how the CIA stood by as arms shipments from Libya enabled the rise of ISIS

May 30, 2015 By administrator

By Marcy Wheeler,

5.-Wikimedia-Duffman-CIA_floor_seal-533x386What did the CIA know and when did they know it?  Report salon.com

That’s the real question that ought to be raised by a recently declassified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, obtained by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The August 2012 document describes how the U.S. ended up on the same general side in the Syrian Civil War as Al Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIS. “AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning,” the report explained. Meanwhile, “[w]estern countries, the Gulf states, and Turkey are supporting” rebel efforts against the Assad regime in a proxy war, putting them on the same side as, if not working together with, the terrorists now overrunning Iraq.

Some outlets have concluded that this means “the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad.”

But as Juan Cole counters, the report that western powers supported rebels “doesn’t say that the US created sectarian groups and it does not say that the US favors al-Qaeda in Syria or the so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq.’” Cole continues, ”It says that those powers (e.g. Turkey and the Gulf monarchies) supporting the opposition wanted to see the declaration of a Salafi (hard line Sunni) breakaway statelet, in order to put pressure on the al-Assad regime.”

In a nutshell, Cole Aagues that the U.S. didn’t support Al-Qaeda in Syria directly. But its allies certainly did.

Two months after the report laying out AQI support for the rebels — another of the documents obtained by Judicial Watch shows — the DIA provided a detailed description of how weapons got shipped from Benghazi to Syria, presumably for rebel groups. “During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the [Qaddafi] regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012,” the report explained, “weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya, to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria.”

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: CIA, document, ISIS

One day you are CIA director next day you’r Turkish government Lobbies Ex. CIA director Porter Goss hired

May 10, 2015 By administrator

Former CIA Director Porter Goss, now Turkish GOV. lobbyist.

Former CIA Director Porter Goss, now Turkish GOV. lobbyist.

The Turkish government has hired former CIA Director Porter Goss for lobbying activities, according to a form filed with the US Department of Justice that was published online.

The form, filed pursuant to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, was published on Friday by The Intercept, an online publication that focuses on reporting on the documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

Goss, who served as the CIA director from 2004 to 2006 under the George W. Bush administration, registered through his new employer, Dickstein Shapiro, a law firm which The Intercept said has a long standing relationship with the Turkish government.

According to the form, Goss will “provide counsel in connection with the extension arid strengthening of the Turkish-American relationship in a number of key areas that are the subject of debate in Congress, including trade, energy security, counter-terrorism efforts and efforts to build regionalstability in the broader Middle East and Europe; educate Members of Congress and the Administration on issues of importance to Turkey; notify Turkey of any action in Congress or the Executive Branch on issues of importance to Turkey; and prepare analyses of developments in Congress and the Executive Branch on issues of importance to Turkey.”

The form, dated April 23, indicates that Goss’ services will continue indefinitely.

The Intercept report called Goss’ decision to work for the Turkish government as an “odd choice” for the ex-CIA director, who once declared “there is no viable alternative to freedom – only freedom offers men and women the opportunity to reach their full potential,” given the poor press freedom record of the Turkish government, which “has arrested dozens of journalists, has violently suppressed peaceful protests and has censored social media.”

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: CIA, Lobbying, Porter Goss, Turkey, Turkish News

BREAKING NEWS C.I.A. Funds Found Their Way Into Al Qaeda Coffers

March 14, 2015 By administrator

qaeda-1-articleLargeIn the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep — $5 million — and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money.
They first turned to a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, according to several Afghan officials involved in the episode. The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund. Report nytimes
Within weeks, that money and $4 million more provided from other countries was handed over to Al Qaeda, replenishing its coffers after a relentless C.I.A. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan had decimated the militant network’s upper ranks.
The C.I.A.’s contribution to Qaeda’s bottom line was just another in a long list of examples of how the United States, largely because of poor oversight and loose financial controls, has sometimes inadvertently financed the very militants it is fighting.
While refusing to pay ransoms for Americans kidnapped by Al Qaeda, the Taliban or, more recently, the Islamic State, the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which has been siphoned off to enemy fighters.

READ MORE »

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/world/asia/cia-funds-found-their-way-into-al-qaeda-coffers.html?emc=edit_na_20150314&nlid=49769097&_r=0

 

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Afghan, Al Qaeda, CIA, Fund

US war against ISIL is ‘total fraud’ to create a CIA base: said Dean Henderson

January 18, 2015 By administrator

McCain-ISISA Pentagon plan to arm and train the so-called moderate militants in Syria to fight against the ISIL terrorist group is a “total fraud” and “bogus” claim to carve out a CIA base in the region, an American journalist in Missouri says.

The United States is fighting a “multi-front war” against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad because he operates independently from the West, said Dean Henderson, an author and columnist at Veterans Today.

“This whole ISIS thing is just an attempt to carve out this base where CIA, Mossad, British intelligence … can operate freely and attack Syria for now but maybe later Iran,” Henderson told Press TV on Sunday.

Henderson said Congress is wasting “precious US tax dollars” to fund the false fight against ISIL, which the CIA helped create in the beginning.

“We’re not against ISIS, we are ISIS, we created ISIS, we trained ISIS, we are ISIS,” he acknowledged.

On Saturday, a delegation of US senators led by John McCain, began a tour of the Middle East, which will take them to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to discuss a Pentagon plan to arm and train “moderate” militants in Syria.

The US Defense Department has announced it is deploying about 1,000 troops to train the Syrian militants to fight against the ISIL terrorist group.

Some analysts reject the notion that “moderate” militants exist in Syria. “Nobody in any position of expertise here thinks that there really is any significant moderate Syrian rebel force. It does not exist,” Dr. Kevin Barrett, a professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, said in an interview with Press TV on Saturday.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: CIA, fraud, ISIL, maccain, US

CIA torture report: human rights groups call for prosecutions

December 10, 2014 By administrator

by Matthew Weaver theguardian
Inside the CIACIA torture report: the world reacts

The world reacted Wednesday morning to the startlingly detailed picture of CIA torture delivered by the Senate on Tuesday. Allies expressed support mixed with regret, while regimes that the United States has sought to isolate by detailing their human rights abuses took the opportunity to turn the criticism back on the US. We have gathered the reactions here.

The list includes United Nations, Britain, Iran, China, North Korea, Poland, Guantánamo, Yemen, Egypt, Malaysia, Russia, France and more. A Twitter account associated with Iran’s supreme leader called out the United States for hypocrisy on human rights and got in a lump about Ferguson, Missouri, for good measure:

The UN has led international condemnation of the CIA’s interrogation and detention programme laid bare by the Senate’s intelligence committee. Its special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights has called for the criminal prosecution of Bush-era officials involved.

Ben Emmerson, UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights

It is now time to take action. The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.

The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level within the US government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.

International law prohibits the granting of immunities to public officials who have engaged in acts of torture. This applies not only to the actual perpetrators but also to those senior officials within the US government who devised, planned and authorised these crimes.

As a matter of international law, the US is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice. The UN convention against torture and the UN convention on enforced disappearances require states to prosecute acts of torture and enforced disappearance where there is sufficient evidence to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction. States are not free to maintain or permit impunity for these grave crimes.

The heaviest penalties should be reserved for those most seriously implicated in the planning and purported authorisation of these crimes. Former Bush Administration officials who have admitted their involvement in the programme should also face criminal prosecution for their acts.

President Obama made it clear more than five years ago that the US government recognises the use of waterboarding as torture. There is therefore no excuse for shielding the perpetrators from justice any longer. The US attorney general is under a legal duty to bring criminal charges against those responsible.

Torture is a crime of universal jurisdiction. The perpetrators may be prosecuted by any other country they may travel to. However, the primary responsibility for bringing them to justice rests with the US Department of Justice and the attorney general.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: CIA, report, torture, USA

Turkey’s Spymaster Plots Own Course on Syria

April 4, 2014 By administrator

Hakan Fidan Takes Independent Tack in Wake of Arab Spring

By Adam Entous in Washington and
Joe Parkinson in Istanbul

WSJ  President Obama and John Kerry met with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and Turkish intelligence chief Fidan, second and third from left, in May. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

P1-BN482_USTURK_G_20131009222734On a rainy May day, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan led two of his closest advisers into the Oval Office for what both sides knew would be a difficult meeting.

It was the first face-to-face between Mr. Erdogan and President Barack Obama in almost a year. Mr. Obama delivered what U.S. officials describe as an unusually blunt message: The U.S. believed Turkey was letting arms and fighters flow into Syria indiscriminately and sometimes to the wrong rebels, including anti-Western jihadists.

Seated at Mr. Erdogan’s side was the man at the center of what caused the U.S.’s unease, Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s powerful spymaster and a driving force behind its efforts to supply the rebels and topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, Mr. Fidan, little known outside of the Middle East, has emerged as a key architect of a Turkish regional-security strategy that has tilted the interests of the longtime U.S. ally in ways sometimes counter to those of the U.S.

“Hakan Fidan is the face of the new Middle East,” says James Jeffrey, who recently served as U.S. ambassador in Turkey and Iraq. “We need to work with him because he can get the job done,” he says. “But we shouldn’t assume he is a knee-jerk friend of the United States, because he is not.”

Mr. Fidan is one of three spy chiefs jostling to help their countries fill a leadership vacuum created by the upheaval and by America’s tentative approach to much of the region.

One of his counterparts is Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, who has joined forces with the Central Intelligence Agency in Syria but who has complicated U.S. policy in Egypt by supporting a military takeover there. The other is Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, commander-in-chief of the Quds Forces, the branch of the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps that operates outside of Iran and whose direct military support for Mr. Assad has helped keep him in power.

Meet the Middle East’s spymasters. Dubai real estate-palooza. Divers assess the Lampedusa wreck. WSJ tracks stories from around the world in The Foreign Bureau. Photo: Associated Press

P1-BN479A_USTUR_D_20131009191513Mr. Fidan’s rise to prominence has accompanied a notable erosion in U.S. influence over Turkey. Washington long had cozy relations with Turkey’s military, the second-largest army in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But Turkey’s generals are now subservient to Mr. Erdogan and his closest advisers, Mr. Fidan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who are using the Arab Spring to shift Turkey’s focus toward expanding its regional leadership, say current and former U.S. officials.

Mr. Fidan, 45 years old, didn’t respond to requests for an interview. Mr. Erdogan’s office declined to elaborate on his relationship with Mr. Fidan.

The U.S. and Turkey are clashing over Syria, complicating U.S. efforts and highlighting how Middle East turmoil is upending longstanding alliances. Adam Entous reports. Photo: AP.

At the White House meeting, the Turks pushed back at the suggestion that they were aiding radicals and sought to enlist the U.S. to aggressively arm the opposition, the U.S. officials briefed on the discussions say. Turkish officials this year have used meetings like this to tell the Obama administration that its insistence on a smaller-scale effort to arm the opposition hobbled the drive to unseat Mr. Assad, Turkish and U.S. officials say.

Mr. Fidan is the prime minister’s chief implementer.

Since he took over Turkey’s national-intelligence apparatus, the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, or MIT, in 2010, Mr. Fidan has shifted the agency’s focus to match Mr. Erdogan’s.

His growing role has met a mixture of alarm, suspicion and grudging respect in Washington, where officials see him as a reliable surrogate for Mr. Erdogan in dealing with broader regional issues—the futures of Egypt, Libya and Syria, among them—that the Arab Spring has brought to the bilateral table.

Mr. Fidan raised concerns three years ago, senior U.S. officials say, when he rattled Turkey’s allies by allegedly passing to Iran sensitive intelligence collected by the U.S. and Israel.

More recently, Turkey’s Syria approach, carried out by Mr. Fidan, has put it at odds with the U.S. Both countries want Mr. Assad gone. But Turkish officials have told the Americans they see an aggressive international arming effort as the best way. The cautious U.S. approach reflects the priority it places on ensuring that arms don’t go to the jihadi groups that many U.S. officials see as a bigger threat to American interests than Mr. Assad.

U.S. intelligence agencies believe Mr. Fidan doesn’t aim to undercut the U.S. but to advance Mr. Erdogan’s interests. In recent months, as radical Islamists expanded into northern Syria along the Turkish border, Turkish officials have begun to recalibrate their policy—concerned not about U.S. complaints but about the threat to Turkey’s security, say U.S. and Turkish officials.

There is no doubt in Turkey where the spymaster stands. Mr. Fidan is “the No. 2 man in Turkey,” says Emre Uslu, a Turkish intelligence analyst who writes for a conservative daily. “He’s much more powerful than any minister and much more powerful than President Abdullah Gul. ”

Still, he cuts a modest figure. Current and former Turkish officials describe him as gentle and unpretentious. In U.S. meetings, he wears dark suits and is soft-spoken, say U.S. officials who have met him repeatedly and contrast him with Prince Bandar, the swashbuckling Saudi intelligence chief.

“He’s not Bandar,” one of the officials says. “No big cigars, no fancy suits, no dark glasses. He’s not flamboyant.”

Mr. Fidan’s ascension is remarkable in part because he is a former noncommissioned officer in the Turkish military, a class that usually doesn’t advance to prominent roles in the armed forces, business or government.

Mr. Fidan earned a bachelor of science degree in government and politics from the European division of the University of Maryland University College and a doctorate in political science from Ankara’s elite Bilkent University. In 2003, he was appointed to head Turkey’s international-development agency.

He joined Mr. Erdogan’s office as a foreign-policy adviser in 2007. Three years later, he was head of intelligence.

“He is my secret keeper. He is the state’s secret keeper,” Mr. Erdogan said of his intelligence chief in 2012 in comments to reporters.

Mr. Fidan’s rise at Mr. Erdogan’s side has been met with some concern in Washington and Israel because of his role in shaping Iran policy. One senior Israeli official says it became clear to Israel that Mr. Fidan was “not an enemy of Iran.” And mistrust already marked relations between the U.S. and Turkish intelligence agencies. The CIA spies on Turkey and the MIT runs an aggressive counterintelligence campaign against the CIA, say current and former U.S. officials.

The tension was aggravated in 2010 when the CIA began to suspect the MIT under Mr. Fidan of passing intelligence to Iran.

At the time, Mr. Erdogan was trying to improve ties with Tehran, a central plank of Ankara’s “zero problems with neighbors” policy. U.S. officials believe the MIT under Mr. Fidan passed several pieces of intelligence to Iran, including classified U.S. assessments about the Iranian government, say current and former senior U.S. and Middle Eastern officials.

U.S. officials say they don’t know why Mr. Fidan allegedly shared the intelligence, but suspect his goal was relationship-building. After the Arab Spring heightened tensions, Mr. Erdogan pulled back from his embrace of Tehran, at which point U.S. officials believe Mr. Fidan did so, too.

Officials at the MIT and Turkey’s foreign ministry declined to comment on the allegations.

In 2012, Mr. Fidan began expanding the MIT’s power by taking control of Turkey’s once-dominant military-intelligence service. Many top generals with close ties to the U.S. were jailed as part of a mass trial and convicted this year of plotting to topple Mr. Erdogan’s government. At the Pentagon, the jail sentences were seen as the coup de grace for the military’s status within the Turkish system.

Mr. Fidan’s anti-Assad campaign harks to August 2011, when Mr. Erdogan called for Mr. Assad to step down. Mr. Fidan later started directing a secret effort to bolster rebel capabilities by allowing arms, money and logistical support to funnel into northern Syria—including arms from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf allies—current and former U.S. officials say.

Mr. Erdogan wanted to remove Mr. Assad not only to replace a hostile regime on Turkey’s borders but also to scuttle the prospect of a Kurdish state emerging from Syria’s oil-rich northeast, political analysts say.

Providing aid through the MIT, a decision that came in early 2012, ensured Mr. Erdogan’s office had control over the effort and that it would be relatively invisible, say current and former U.S. officials.

Syrian opposition leaders, American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats who worked with Mr. Fidan say the MIT acted like a “traffic cop” that arranged weapons drops and let convoys through checkpoints along Turkey’s 565-mile border with Syria.

Some moderate Syrian opposition leaders say they immediately saw that arms shipments bypassed them and went to groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party has supported Muslim Brotherhood movements across the region.

Syrian Kurdish leaders, meanwhile, charge that Ankara allowed arms and support to reach radical groups that could check the expanding power of Kurdish militia aligned with Turkey’s militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

Turkish border guards repeatedly let groups of radical fighters cross into Syria to fight Kurdish brigades, says Salih Muslim, co-chairman of the Democratic Union of Syria, Turkey’s most powerful Kurdish party. He says Turkish ambulances near the border picked up wounded fighters from Jabhat al Nusra, an anti-Assad group linked to al Qaeda. Turkish officials deny those claims.

Opposition lawmakers from the border province of Hatay say Turkish authorities transported Islamist fighters to frontier villages and let fighter-filled planes land at Hatay airport. Turkish officials deny both allegations.

Mehmet Ali Ediboglu, a lawmaker for Hatay’s largest city, Antakya, and a member of the parliament’s foreign-relations committee, says he followed a convoy of more than 50 buses carrying radical fighters and accompanied by 10 police vehicles to the border village of Guvecci. “This was just one incident of many,” he says. Voters in his district strongly oppose Turkish support for the Syrian opposition. Turkish officials deny Mr. Ediboglu’s account.

In meetings with American officials and Syrian opposition leaders, Turkish officials said the threat posed by Jabhat al Nusra, the anti-Assad group, could be dealt with later, say U.S. officials and Syrian opposition leaders.

The U.S. added Nusra to its terror list in December, in part to send a message to Ankara about the need to more tightly control the arms flow, say officials involved in the internal discussions.

The May 2013 White House encounter came at a time when Mr. Obama had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the Turkish leader’s policies relating to Syria, Israel and press freedoms, say current and former U.S. officials.

Mr. Obama told the Turkish leaders he wanted a close relationship, but he voiced concerns about Turkey’s approach to arming the opposition. The goal was to convince the Turks that “not all fighters are good fighters” and that the Islamist threat could harm the wider region, says a senior U.S. official.

This year, Turkey has dialed back on its arming efforts as it begins to worry that the influence of extremist rebel groups in Syria might bleed back into Turkey. At Hatay airport, the alleged way station for foreign fighters headed to Syria, the flow has markedly decreased, says a representative of a service company working at the airport.

In September, Turkey temporarily shut part of its border after fighting erupted between moderate Syrian rebels and an Iraqi al Qaeda outfit, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Turkish President Gul warned that “radical groups are a big worry when it comes to our security.”

In recent months, Turkish officials have told U.S. counterparts that they believe the lack of American support for the opposition has fueled extremism because front-line brigades believe the West has abandoned them, say U.S. and Turkish officials involved in the discussions.

In September, Mr. Davutoglu, the foreign minister, met Secretary of State John Kerry, telling him Turkey was concerned about extremists along the Syrian border, say U.S. and Turkish officials. The Turks wanted Mr. Kerry to affirm that the U.S. remained committed to the Syrian opposition, say U.S. officials.

Mr. Kerry told Turkish officials the U.S. was committed but made clear, a senior administration official says of the Turkish leaders, that “they need to be supportive of the right people.”

Also in September, Mr. Fidan met with CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, say Turkish and U.S. officials, who decline to say what was discussed.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official says Mr. Fidan has built strong relationships with many of his international counterparts. At the same time, a current U.S. intelligence official says, it is clear “we look at the world through different lenses.”

Write to Adam Entous at adam.entous@wsj.com and Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: CIA, Syria, Turkey's Spymaster, Turkish MIT

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