Bush, Obama & Trump Middle East Policy is one in the same

I have attempted to stay out of the fray regarding what has just happened in Syria.  It is almost as if Obama is still in Office and as if Trump has turned into Obama in the same fashion Obama turned into Bush. For all I know Trump is putting together a secret “kill list” like his predecessor and continuing Obama’s drone strike assassination program. I have read some interesting perspectives on this topic and agree with many of them.  For example, Norman Solomon’s suggesting that all this incessant Russian bashing may have been used to ‘bait’ Trump to bomb Syria, with or without evidence. I also agree with MIT professor of Science, Technology, and International Security Dr. Theodore Postol in his assessment of the White House report noting that it provides no evidence that the Sarin came from or was dropped from an Airplane and that without being on the ground at the time such a position is impossible to prove given Assad’s advantage in his battle against IS and other western supported terrorist proxies. For lack of a better statement, to use the words of Mike Whitney, “You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that the case against Syrian President Bashar al Assad is extremely weak.” Or as the free-thinking cats at MOA have pointed out, the White House “assessment” begins with "The United States is confident that the Syrian government conducted a chemical weapon attack, ..." noting that “The U.S…. does not have"proof" - it is just "confident".” And returning to Dr. Postol, he was also correct in 2013 when he disproved the Obama Administration uninformed position that Assad was responsible for a chemical nerve agent attack in Damascus.  My question is will Trump be another Obama with respect to Foreign policy in West Asia and use his war powers even out there past Obama? Will he engage in even more unjustified and clandestine wars in the same way Bush and Obama did by targeting even more majority-Muslim countries?

Let us begin with some historical perspective. The west has had its eye on Syria for decades now.  Although many would assert it started with a 1949 coup attemp timplemented by the CIA just 3 years after Syria became an independent country, I would suggest it started after WW1 in 1919 and continued up until the Franco-Syrian war initially. Specifically, after the implementation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 - which cut up what was left of the Ottoman Empire between France and Britain. The war itself happened in 1920 ending in a victory for the French and the formation of a new pro-French government. This resulted in Syria being divided in to several regions according to religion. This is an important historical event because it appears the object of current western interference and the call for regime change in the nation has a similar objective.

In addition, history shows us that the objective of these efforts was to dominate and control the rich natural resources (oil and natural gas) in the region. As early as 1957 President Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan were making plans to establish and support financially the establishment of what they called a “Free Syria Committee” for the singular purpose of regime change in Syria to try and control the oil fields of not only Syria but also Iraq. There was no real geopolitical reason for this other than the desire of the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) to build a Trans-Arabian Pipe Line (TAPLINE) from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean via Syria through to Turkey. This required a “Syrian right-of-way” to be agreed upon without input from the Syrian people of course.

Unfortunately, the efforts of the west resulted in making a divide between Shiite and Sunni that has been going on since the seventh century even worse especially if one considers that Shiites are the majority in Iran and Iraq, and are the largest Muslim group in Lebanon and their lands include what many consider the richest oil fields in the entirety of the Middle East. 

These efforts have only increased and intensified over the past few decades with regime change in Syria being priority. First a unified Syria stands in the way of policy objectives in the region to numerous and nuanced to discuss (US interests both in Lebanon and preventing the establishment of an Iraq’s pipeline to the Mediterranean for example). We know this because recently unclassified documents show that the CIA even made plans to use Iraq, Israel and Turkey as proxies in 1983 to pressure the Syrian government by using covert military actions just to establish a pipeline. Although this didn’t manifest, it did not prevent the CIA from continuing to try for in 1986 they drew up some more ideas to overthrow Syria by provoking sectarian tensions (does this sound familiar?). The same policy goals were desired again in 1991 and in 2001.

What we see now - with the supposed “civil war” in Syria - has been years in the making and the recent efforts of ISIS and other terrorist extremist (all supported by the West and Saudi Arabia) may have finally come to fruition after hard work put in by the British government according to former French foreign minister Roland Dumas who is on record saying that he got it from the horse’s mouth that “top British officials” were in the process of arming Sunni nationals “to invade Syria” in 2009 – two years before the anti-Assad protest. Then there is what then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in 2012: that the best way to help Israel deal with Iranis to help overthrow Bashar Assad.

So it seems that President Trump is no different than Obama or Bush or his democratic opponent Hillary Clinton and their desire to use any excuse to make bankers and oil giants the benefactors of the wealth to be generated by a divided Syria without Assad at the helm.  Chemical weapons like WMDs in Iraq, was contrived as an excuse to justify their goals.  I mean we know that Turkey supplied Sarin gas to Syrian rebels in 2013in order to frame the Syrian government. We also know that independent Humanitarian organizations have documented that ISIS has used chemical weapons, including Sarin, chlorine and sulfur mustard agents, at least 52 times on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq since 2014.

We also know that just like the Bush Administration, Hillary Clinton and Obama cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government to fund and arm clandestine operations designed to take down Iran and its ally Syria  by encouraging Sunni extremist groups that not only champion a militant view of Islam but are also are anti-America and sympathetic to ISIS and Al Qaeda. All which seem to be from extremist Islamic fundamentalist groups with origins in or connections to Saudi Arabia. 

In all sincerity, the west, as in Yemen, is backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, Sunni’s who are an openly admitted group that considers the U.S. and of Israel as lifelong enemies. By bombing Assad, we are basically s one writer put it serving as the ISIS/Al Qaeda Air force. This in my opinion, is no different that when Barack Obama invaded Libya without Congressional approval in 2011.  Trump clearly is no different and seems to take his marching orders from the neoconservatives and neoliberals who won’t be happy until a major U.S. military intervention happens in Syria (and other places) even if it means a confrontation with Russia and/or China. You may question my analysis but for what it is worth, NSC adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster is no dissimilar than Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, or Nuland’s husband – Robert Kagen on this matter.

Again as I asked in the beginning of this essay, is Trump any different than Bush or Obama? I suspect not. As one writer pointed out: “I don’t think that anybody seriously believes that Assad or anybody else in the Syrian government really ordered a chemical weapons attack on anybody.  To believe that it would require you to find the following sequence logical: first, Assad pretty much wins the war against Daesh which is in full retreat.  Then, the US declares that overthrowing Assad is not a priority anymore (up to here this is all factual and true).  Then, Assad decides to use weapons he does not have.  He decides to bomb a location with no military value, but with lots of kids and cameras.  Then, when the Russians demand a full investigation, the Americans strike as fast as they can before this idea gets any support.  And now the Americans are probing a possible Russian role in this so-called attack.  Frankly, if you believe any of that, you should immediately stop reading and go back to watching TV.”

I remember the Gulf of Tonkin and other major U.S. lies to justify war like the one in 1970 when our government lied to the American people and said, “We didn’t cross the border going into Cambodia” when in fact we did. Former UK ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, was correct in his assessment equally when he said like Libya, Syria will "implode" if President Assad was removed from office period. Not to mention bombing Syria does nothing to provide humanitarian relief and merely distracts the world from the West supported atrocities in Yemen, Mosul and the South Sudan.

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The Falsity of a Free Press

For some reason that I have failed to comprehend, people are actually up in arms over the manner in which President Trump is addressing and defining mainstream media outlets – namely CNN, the Washington Post, New York Times and MSNBC among others. I have heard it pronounced as an attack on democracy or that his actions characterize an effrontery to a free press. It is the latter notion that sets me aback for the press in America isn’t reflective of free, rather it is corporatist for lack of an even more accurate description.

When we assert the concept of press freedoms or freedom of the press, it implies that there is no interference from any ever-powerful or omnipresent political or established state, or other organizational entity.  We do not have this with the mainstream media in America anymore. What is called and referred to as a “free press” is in reality just a vehicle by which the public is fed the agenda of government and corporations under the cloak of unrevealed activities of elites in newsrooms primarily located in New York and Washington, DC. Modestly put, the mainstream media isn’t a free press but rather a speaking board by which state and corporate bodies are able to repeat without investigation, the narratives designed to encourage spreading specific political information to program thought and behavior.

Moreover, the people that own and run these East and West coast news outlets are billionaires, like Rupert Murdoch,  Michael Bloomberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who own all or significant proportions of media platforms the likes of the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. This is factual at the local level as well for Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway owns more than 60 daily newspapers across the nation. Taking this a step farther, it is estimated that 90% of what we watch, listen to and read is owned by 6 companies. Yes it is true, News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS and Comcast own 90% of the TV stations, radio stations, movies, magazines and newspapers that every American rely on for news, entertainment and information many require to be so-called ‘woke.’

Such a consolidation of news media companies cannot be considered the stalwart of a free press, instead it is an ‘owned press’ in which freedom means motives of operation imbued in the content they select to provide or hide thanks mostly to Congress and the FCC, and which was accelerated in 1996 when then President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, which led to rapid consolidation of the radio industry. Just think about it, in 1983, 50 companies owned 90% of American media.

Now I know the contrarian who watches six or more hours of TV a day, well above the time we spend reading and asking questions will disagree.  But history and the official record suggest otherwise. In 1975, the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities found that the CIA submitted stories to the American press. In fact, in the 1950s, the CIA put in place Operation Mockingbird which was a program designed to, and effectively used US journalists at establishments like the New York Times and CBS to feed them official state propaganda stories to send out to their American consumers.

Journalists were even paid by the CIA to promote such stories or on the low end, just given the information and put it out as real news, when in fact it was made-up and fabricated propaganda - ‘fake news’. The truth of the matter is that the US government via the CIA, has for years influenced US news media to advocate specific political storylines. Although Operation Mockingbird was supposedly ended in the 1970s, the objective and free thinking individuals could imagine that the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 still serves the mission and purpose of the federal government by allowing for the American public to be a target audience for U.S. government-funded narrative inculcation campaigns. And don’t sleep, it was way harder to carry out such activities after 1953 when Allen W. Dulles became director of the CIA because there were more individual players in terms of wire services and newspapers then.  

I’m not sure but I think it was Malcolm X who called this shit ‘tricknology’. These folk are effectively and actively trying to influence the narratives that mindless self-absorbed narcissist ignorantly consume in an effort to create your reality for YOU. And I know it is effective because YOU believe it.  Wouldn’t surprise me none if such cats watch the Oscars and see a movie about the White Helmets win yet yo dumb azz can’t comprehend you been sold a storyline to completely hide the fact that the White Helmets are a component of Al-Qaeda. It is called TV programming and not TV reasoning – they just  “programming” into your mind every single day for hours upon hours what they want you to think and accept without research and query to believe what they want you to believe and sway on how you see the world. 

It is you, your bich azz that allow these immovable establishments to fix the agenda for what they want you to care about – Russians, Jeff Sessions and Russians, General Flynn and Russians, Russians interfered in out elections. But as I said, yet you don’t even realize the information released in Podesta and DNC hacks (if the Russians released it or not) was accurate and factual but never ask if I should consider if I should have this information to make a electoral decision, or tow the MSM line that I should not use this to inform myself, although factual just because of what I watch on TV say you shouldn’t? But keep on with the Bay of Pigs, Gulf of Tonkin, Mandela a terrorist, FBI didn’t spy on MLK, there was not Tuskegee Experiment, we have to do Iran-Contra and the ubiquitous Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (when you knew Iraq never attacked us).

Six corporations’ folk, 90%, send everything through your television, everything you watch. You can trust them folk, I won’t.  So wake up folk, can’t be woke and sleep walking, they are not the free press, they got a pimp.

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The Stasi Has Returned and it is American

The sudden resignation of National Security Adviser and retired General Michael Flynn and the unprecedented leaks pouring out to damage and even destroy the Trump presidency is a throwback to what I recall other nations (namely autocratic or communist regimes) did when the political status quo felt threatened. Likewise, they often emerged as a consequence of actions taken by top members in state sponsored intelligence operations.

There are several possibilities for this including oscitant retribution proffered by folk like former CIA director John Brennan and former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, or even a backlash by career officials (Democratic politicians and, more importantly, theintelligence community) in an effort for whatever reason, to keep Trump from instituting his foreign policy agenda.

Sadly many in the elite east coast press and large numbers of Democrats support these actions while failing to accept and admit that for unelected officials to go around the constitution and imped policy efforts of a democratically elected official, whether you support that official or not, is seditious and boarders on actions of former governments run by police apparatus like the Stasi of East Germany.

The Stasi was a shorthand term used to describe the East German State Security "Staatssicherheit." It was a combination of the United States FBI, CIA and NSA for lack of a better description, meaning they had policing, investigating and uninhibited surveillance powers. The Stasi was responsible for hundreds of thousands of perceived political opponents being tried without due process, imprisoned and even murdered in an effort to suffocate political dissention against all the tenants of conventional democratic standards.

Most people they imprisoned and executed where charged with specific acts such as engaging in "propaganda hostile to the state," interfering in “activities of the state or society" orthe "treasonable relaying of information." In addition to domestic surveillance, the Stasi was also responsible for foreign surveillance. Through the use of wiretapping (it is illegal to wiretap the U.S. President) and anonymous unsourced claims unaided by any evidence (sounds familiar), for more than four decades, the Stasi operated unfettered and without remorse until the collapse of Communist East Germany and the opening of the borders with West Germany in 1989. These type of energies seem to have been put into action inside the Beltway as it regards the Trump administration.

It is obvious that there is a real fear or hatred for Trump as he goes about his campaign promise to “drain the swamp” and dismantle the bureaucratic system of politics including the FBI, CIA and NSA and their historic abuse of unfettered power that they feels places them over the elected government. Also clear, is that even before Hillary Clinton ran, highbrow member of the Washington political establishment, including assets of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, were supporting her hook, line and sinker. From former acting CIA Director Michael Morell and Gen. Michael Hayden who served in the capacity of both director of the NSA and CIA under George W. Bush. Both men, without evidence or proof asserted that Trump was a “useful fool” and Russian agent being influenced by Putin.

Upon which, immediately rumors started to be thrown into the political ether. In particular when then candidate Trump continuously rejected the establishment narrative of the media and intelligence community that under the direct orders of Putin, Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta emails in order to interfere with the election on the side and behalf of the Republican nominee. This was followed by a pile-on by the Democratic Party which since then have willingly encompassed this effort to disrupt the elected President who they gave no chance of winning.

Since then we have had the Trump “dossier” which was produced by a former member of the British intelligence agency MI6 and hired first by a never-Trump super Pac and then the Democratic Party to find some dirt on Trump. This report fell apart, although the media tried to establish a narrative that it was true, when it was proven that unlike the dossier stated as fact, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had never secretly traveled to Prague in August to meet with Russian officials or had ever been to Czceh Republic..

Why would the intelligence establishment take this path? Well even a blind person can see that their preferences for Clinton was in line with all of their desired policy objectives: Trump wants to work with Putin to destroy ISIS and Clinton wanted to go deeper into Syria in an effort to get Assad out of office as she did Gadhafi in Libya. For this reason if my logic is tenable, targeting Trumps security executives would be paramount.  More than likely, Flynn was planning to try and reform and change the mindset of the national security state in America. Such would have surly been an economic loss the military industrial complex could not afford to take a chance on.  It has been said that all wars are banker’s wars and we are well aware that banks dole out large sums of money to the US military and intelligence apparatus.

The short of the story is that the East Germany Stasi, even if not in body, in action is alive in the administrative halls of Washington, DC.  Like the Stasi, elements in the U.S. intelligence community are essentially committing treason against the Office of the President of the United States by leaking classified material to the press. This is also without a doubt happening with the urging and assistance of former Obama administration appointees because anonymous leaks without any evidence at all is speculation, guessing and/or gossip. Unfortunately, the democrats and mainstream media flunkies are more than giddy to run with any claim, substantiated or not to bring down Trump and his administration. This is the most probably scenario given from the Obama years, we know the immense powers the U.S. intelligence community has through the leaks (not anonymous) of Edward Snowden alone and that he gave them even more powers days before leaving office. As one writer noted: “Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what policestates do."

Any assertion regarding Russia’s interference in U.S. elections as been presented based on guess and without evidence. The charges with Flynn began with the remnants of the Obama Department of Justice when then acting attorney general Sally Yates told the White House counsel that Flynn was not telling the truth with respect to talking about sanctions with the Russian ambassador. How did she know this and who authorized wiretapping Flynn’s communication? Still, we do not know if this was true since the phone transcripts have not been released. All I can state is that these attacks against the President and his administration were planned and contrived in what I perceive as a hidden effort to thwart the will of the American people by elements representative of the Democratic Party, the U.S. intelligence establishment and mainstream media.

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