ISIS, the world’s most infamous terror group, has shocked the interwebz again after posting a new propaganda video that showcases its massive arsenal of tanks and heavy artillery. The video shows tank after tank, artillery piece after artillery piece, and Toyota truck after Toyota truck rolling triumphantly by, all in an effort to recruit radical Islamic youth to the caliphate’s cause. If some of those arms look oddly familiar, it’s because many — if not most of them — are American-made weapons.
This leaves us with many questions regarding where ISIS obtained all of these Western-supplied weapons of war. The most obvious answer lies in ISIS’ early military victories in Northern Iraq, namely Mosul, where caliphate forces easily trounced the Iraqi army and captured enormous amounts of military assets. In the battle of Mosul alone, ISIS captured 2,300 American-made Humvees worth over $1 billion.
However, prior to the capture of Mosul, the groups, which eventually became ISIS, were receiving weapons from U.S. allies in the region — including Saudi Arabia and Turkey — in an attempt to use Islamist fighters to overthrow the Russian-backed Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. The weapons these Sunni states were supplying to ISIS, then in its infancy, were being sold by the West to the Gulf countries. The largest seller was the Unites States, followed by the United Kingdom — two countries that are now bombing ISIS. Sound confusing? That’s because it is.
And we can’t forget about the “moderate” Syrian opposition that the U.S. and its allies have been training and arming since 2013. According to a new report from Amnesty International, many of ISIS’ arms have come from units defecting from the Free Syrian Army, as well as other rebel groups previously aligned with the United States and its plan to oust Bashar al-Assad. “ISIS has also gained access to weapons from other sources through the capture or sale of Syrian military stocks supplied to armed opposition groups in Syria by countries including Turkey, the Gulf States and the U.S.,” concluded CNN.
According to the Amnesty International report, the calamity of Western arms ending up in the hands of ISIS can also be partially blamed on “decades of irresponsible arms transfers to Iraq and multiple failures by the U.S.-led occupation administration to manage arms deliveries and stocks securely, as well as endemic corruption in Iraq itself.”
Despite these troubling findings, the Obama administration recently committed to providing even more weapons to the Syrian opposition — and even loosened its vetting procedures for who can receive American arms.
In the end, the West’s fight against ISIS is against insurgents using the West’s own weapons — and against fighters that were, in fact, created by the West’s own policies. As we’ve covered extensivelyat Anti-Media, prior to ISIS’ reemergence into Iraq from Syria, the group was considered a useful tool to accomplish U.S. foreign policy goals in Syria in the form of destabilizing — and ultimately overthrowing — the Russian-backed Syrian government. To understand why the West wants Assad gone (and why Russia doesn’t), continue reading here.
The Syrian civil war rages on, displacing as many as 11 million people and killing nearly 300,000 as the conflict reaches into its fifth year. Syria, a longtime ally of Russia, has been receiving material support from the Eastern giant since the 1940s. As Anti-Media reported last month,
“Russia’s support for Syria dates back to 1946, when Russia helped consolidate Syria’s independence. The two countries mutually came to a diplomatic and military agreement in the form of a non-aggression pact, which was enacted on April 20, 1950. In this pact, Russia promised support to the newly-created Syria by helping to develop its military and by providing tactical support. Essentially, Russia and Syria have been cooperating for decades both militarily and economically, with Russia maintaining a naval base on the Syrian Mediterranean.”
Meanwhile, the United States also has its own designs on the region. In 2013, President Obama, along with John Kerry, attempted to stir up enough public support for a direct regime change in Syria, tugging at the American public’s freedom-spreading, democracy-loving heart strings. This attempt at a public overthrow of the Syrian government failed, with Americans responding with the massive #NoWarWithSyria protest movement.
However, the drive for regime change didn’t end just because the government stopped talking about it. The CIA continued to arm basically any group willing to fight against the Assad government. The Pentagon also tried (but failed), to manufacture an American-allied army out of so-called moderate Syrian rebels at the cost of $500 million — who, on paper would oppose ISIS, but in reality work to oust Assad.
Russia, who has been a Syrian ally for decades, has remained steadfast in its support of the Assad regime — openly supplying weapons, aircraft, tanks, intelligence, and human resources in the form of military advisers. Russia also operates a naval base on Syria’s Mediterranean shores.
By any measure, this is a textbook proxy war between military powers vying to maintain their own economic interests in the Middle East. However, five years later, it seems the corporate media is finally “realizing” this shadow war for what it is. Over the weekend, The Washington Post ran an article titled, “Did U.S. weapons supplied to Syrian rebels draw Russia into the conflict?” The article goes on to state:
“American antitank missiles supplied to Syrian rebels are playing an unexpectedly prominent role in shaping the Syrian battlefield, giving the conflict the semblance of a proxy war between the United States and Russia, despite President Obama’s express desire to avoid one.”
Then, on Monday, The New York Times published a piece titled “U.S. Weaponry Is Turning Syria Into a Proxy War With Russia.” The article admits that Syrian rebels are receiving abundant amounts of arms from the CIA, which are being used to fight the Russian-backed advance of Assad’s troops as he tries to take back Syria from the various rebel, Islamist, and terror groups that have overtaken much of countryside.
What should be clear is that the Unites States’ priority in the region is not to defeat ISIS, but instead to overthrow Assad.
Clever rhetoric disguises America’s covert intentions, but the actions — and subsequent paper trail — paint a very clear picture of what is truly happening in Syria. WikiLeaks gives us some insight into the West’s designs on Syria, providing a window into the longtime campaign to oust Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. A new book that analyzes diplomatic cables leaked by Chelsea Manning, The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire, reveals the U.S. had a longstanding regime change policy in Syria that dates back long before the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that rocked the Middle East.
What is hidden beneath all of this information is why the United States wants Assad ousted from power so badly.
The most obvious excuse was his open abuse of human rights. And while this was the exact story-line given to the U.S. public from our “friends” in the media, the rhetoric comes off as empty at best, considering the U.S. actively supported Saudi Arabia’s brutal crackdown of Arab Spring protesters.
It’s unfortunate that it took the corporate media all these years to “discover” that the United States and Russia are fighting a geopolitical proxy war in Syria. It remains to be seen how many more years and lost lives it will take for them to also “discover” that this proxy war is being fought over resources and power. It’s a sad state of affairs when the Western media provides humanitarian cover for the U.S. and NATO to fuel a brutal civil war — which has taken the lives of nearly 300,000 people — simply to create economic advantages for NATO states and allies while undermining stability in the Middle East — creating the greatest humanitarian catastrophe since World War II. And as millions of refugees continue to pour out of Syria into Europe and abroad, the NATO-dominated public of the E.U. and U.S. remain largely ignorant to the fact their own governments helped create the refugee crisis they so abhor.
In less than a week, law enforcement agencies in three different Missouri cities have investigated the purchase of large quantities of cell phones at Walmart stores. In two cases, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was contacted.
Last Saturday, KSPR reports that police were called to a Lebanon, Mo., Walmart when two men purchased about 60 cell phones early in the morning. Police tell KSPR that terrorists can use cell phones as bomb detonators in addition to using them for communication, and can be hard to track if prepaid.
KSPR says the men weren’t arrested because police say they hadn’t technically done anything wrong. However, the Laclede County Sheriff’s Office says it contacted the FBI.
An FBI spokesperson told FOX 4 on Wednesday that it’s standard procedure for law enforcement agencies to contact them if they deem something to be suspicious.
On Monday, KMIZ reports that Columbia police say they were alerted to something similar when several men bought dozens of phones at a Walmart late last week, and paid in cash.
“It’s not right, it doesn’t make any sense,” a witness told KMIZ. “Who’s going to order 50 phones for Christmas? Who does that?”
On Wednesday, the Macon County Sheriff’s Office said it is investigating a similar report at a Macon Walmart:
Since Edward Snowden revealed the federal government’s unlawful and unconstitutional use of federal statutes to justify spying on all in America all the time, including the members of Congress who unwittingly wrote and passed the statutes, I have been arguing that the Fourth Amendment prohibits all domestic spying, except that which has been authorized by a search warrant issued by a judge. The same amendment also requires that warrants be issued only based on a serious level of individualized suspicion backed up by evidence — called probable cause — and the warrants must specifically identify the place and person to be spied upon.
Because these requirements are in the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, Congress and the president and the courts are bound by them. There is no emergency or public safety or wartime exception to them. These requirements cannot be changed by legislation; only a constitutional amendment, ratified by the legislatures of 37 states, can do so
All of this is what lawyers and judges call black letter law — meaning it is well-understood, has not been seriously challenged and is nearly universally accepted. Except by the government.
The government — which thinks it can right any wrong, tax any event, regulate any behavior and interfere with any right — also thinks it can keep us safe from the terrorists among us by cutting constitutional corners, which it has done many times since 9/11. Among the constitutional corners it has cut is unleashing its 60,000 domestic spies upon us with orders to disregard the constitutional requirements for spying on Americans and gather all the data about us that they can by listening to phone calls and reading emails, as well as gathering the banking information, credit card information, utility bills, postal mail and medical records of everyone in America, without regard to individualized suspicio
The San Bernardino killings — like those in Newtown, Connecticut; at Virginia Tech; in Roseburg, Oregon; and in Paris — occurred on or near government property where lawful guns were banned. These no-gun zones are the most dangerous places on the planet when a person armed to the teeth and determined to kill enters upon them.
As we know from the tragedy last week in San Bernardino, California, the government’s strategy and practices failed to keep us safe.
The San Bernardino killings — like those in Newtown, Connecticut; at Virginia Tech; in Roseburg, Oregon; and in Paris — occurred on or near government property where lawful guns were banned. These no-gun zones are the most dangerous places on the planet when a person armed to the teeth and determined to kill enters upon them.
No-gun zones are not only unconstitutional legislative limitations on the natural right of people to use modern-day means for self-defense but also an invitation to disaster. And they are established by local municipalities with the consent of state governments.
The federal failure is born of an antipathy to constitutional norms and a reluctance to engage in meaningful human intelligence on the ground. Instead of gathering all they can about everyone, the feds should concentrate on those about whom there is some reasonable belief to warrant some investigation. The feds should know the neighborhoods where the suspicious live and work as well as they know their own computer screens.
Even the National Security Agency itself has admitted to data overload. In 2013, the director of the NSA at the time, Gen. Keith Alexander, was asked how many plots his spies had unearthed in their then-seven years of spying on everyone in the U.S., and he replied under oath, “About 54.” Then he corrected himself and amended his answer to one or two. When asked to identify them, he declined.
Why weren’t a recently married couple with Middle Eastern backgrounds — one of whom had been born here, the other of whom had immigrated here and achieved permanent legal residence only through marriage, both of whom recently had been stockpiling huge amounts of military-style weaponry and ammunition, both of whom had just received more than half their combined annual income in a single wire transfer to their joint bank account, both of whom had been practicing the use of their hardware at a gun range, one of whom had been known to hate Jewish people and had suddenly left his local mosque — generally known to the all-seeing and all-hearing NSA?
Because the NSA has abandoned traditional techniques of on-the-ground, in-your-face human intelligence in favor of sitting in front of computer screens. And that has produced a haystack of data so gigantic in size that by the time the needle of terror plotting has been found, it is often too late.
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