November 19, 2015

Paris Evokes 9/11 in State of Fear and Revenge

Paris Evokes 9/11 in State of Fear and Revenge

In reference to attacks in Paris, Col. Larry Wilkerson says the reincarnation of al-Qaeda in ISIS must be rationally dealt with if their defeat is the goal - November 17, 2015

Bio

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled "National Security Decision Making."

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT Below the You Tube or TOTAL TRANSCRIPT at.........

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=15105



SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. Also welcome to this edition of the Larry Wilkerson Report on the Real News Network.As you know, Larry Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to the United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William and Mary. Larry, as always, thank you for joining us today.

LARRY WILKERSON: Thanks for having me.PERIES: So Larry, on this very sad occasion following the attacks in Paris, I guess all of us are wondering why France, and what is it about American foreign policy, and now French foreign policy in the region of the Middle East in particular, where the IS is lodged. Why Paris?

WILKERSON: I think your initial remarks reflect the reciprocation, if you will, of what Le Monde, as I recall, carried as a headline on our 9/11. And that was, we are all Americans now. Well, we're feeling like we're all French now. And while my heart goes out to le France and to Paris, and to the families and loved ones of the people who were killed in Paris, I also have to reflect on the rational side of this.And the rational side of this is what Joby Warrick has said in his new book about the rise of ISIS. The title of the book is Black Flags. And though I disagree with a number of the conclusions Joby comes to in that book, I don't disagree at all with his main point about the rise of ISIS and how it started with Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq, it blossomed into Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and then Al-Qaeda in Iraq, because of largely the Sunnis uprising against it in Iraq, was more or less driven out and reduced to a minimal personnel, when to Syria as a matter of fact, and now has been unleashed once again and looks like it's much more potent, powerful than it was before, and start talking about what that means for Western Europe, for the West in general.

What it means for those who might pose themselves as being opposed to this kind of terrorism and this kind of treachery and evil in the world. Including France, including Belgium, including the NATO countries, including the United States, of course, and all those who rally around that flag. The rational way of looking at this is this is an instrument of terrorism that is being used against us principally because of our policies and because of our support for, unbalanced support for Israel, and because of our inability to understand and comprehend what's going on in the region.That said, it is base evil. There's no question about it. Turning to these kinds of instruments and these kind of people to do these kinds of things is horrible. It is the, it's the lowest level, if you will, of the depravity that humans can reach. And yet if you aren't rational about why it's happening, and you aren't rational about what you need to do in response to its happening, you're not going to defeat it. And just one case in point, I understand that this happened on President Hollande's watch just as 9/11 happened on Dick Cheney and George Bush's watch, and that you have to be, in a democracy in particular, if you want to stay in power you have to be responsive.

You have to look as if you're being responsive. You have to even advocate violence that approaches the violence that's been used against you.And so you declare war. You say the war instrument is now what you're going to do. But what the war instrument does is it changes the entire legal regime under which you're operating. It enhances the ability of the executive, whether in France or the United States to be draconian, to usurp civil rights, to take away other people's rights, and to basically begin to injure the very fabric of the republic that is France or the United States. And you have to be very careful when you do that.

It also, I hasten to add, plays into the, more or less, the strategy of those whom you're fighting. Because what Abu al-Zarqawi, who is probably the most intellectual of those against whom we're fighting, the man who's in charge of Al-Qaeda now, and what al-Baghdadi wants in a more visceral fashion, is for the powers in the world, especially those in the West, the Christian powers if you will, although we're not a Christian power.

We act like it most of the time. He wants them to overextend. He wants them to overreact. He wants them to spend money, vast sums of money, on the apparatuses we've created in order to counter these people. And he wants them to by that methodology and that strategy to destroy themselves. And that may sound preposterous, but it's not. It's not at all preposterous if you look at the history of empire, the history of great powers, and so forth.

So we need to be very careful about how we react to these incidents which are all, you'll get nothing out of me that says they aren't horrible, but we need to be careful about how we react to them. We need to be smart, in other words. We need to be wise.

PERIES: Larry, what's going on at the moment as we are talking is that there's--a tremendous amount of bombing is going on in Syria in retaliation. And one of the things that is also happening is at the G20 in Turkey this issue of Syria is being discussed. And you were saying we have to be very careful. But what should they be discussing, and what should be the response?

WILKERSON: They should be discussing on a case by case basis how we go after the elements opposing a government in Baghdad, that are fighting in Iraq, and the elements that are opposing, attempting to overthrow, the government in Damascus, Assad, which incidentally is still the legitimate government of Syria. And we should be prioritizing how we're going to use all of our assets, and Marco Rubio declaring that we should invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty, an attack on one is an attack on all, is a wonderful political move.

I mean, it plays really well to the right wing of the Republican party and to others in America. But it really doesn't get anything done. It doesn't get anything done at all.We need to prioritize what we're doing in the region. The first priority, the very first priority, needs to be defeating ISIS by whatever means are necessary in the region. And if those means include a tacit alliance between the Russians, the Iranians, the Turks, the Americans, and anybody else who wants to join in the fight, and I would say we need to drag the Saudis and others into the fight kicking and screaming, because they're the ones who funded this business in the first place. We need to prioritize to doing that before we do anything else.

We need to defeat these forces before they get to the point where they are all over the region and causing problems throughout the world.You won't ever defeat them completely. That's the reason I hate using war as a metaphor. You're never going to win, quote-unquote, this struggle. But you've got to get it down to a manageable level. And getting it down to a manageable level means that you get them down to where they were, for example, in 2010 when we had killed Zarqawi and we had more or less eviscerated them inside Iraq. You need to do it in Syria, you need to do it in Iraq. Of course you're probably going to have to combat [in] other places like Libya and Afghanistan, too. But they're less of a threat there and we don't need them to become any bigger a threat there. So we need to go to the root of the matter and prioritize and get rid of them in Syria and Iraq.

And that means putting these other things, like unseating Assad and so forth, aside for the moment.PERIES: Right. And Larry, finally, France plays a large role in the world as an arms trader and manufacturing arms, selling it to various forces and countries that are fighting in the Middle East. Has this type of policy, arms trading policy, being a part of their calculation in terms of reacting to the Middle East at the moment?

WILKERSON: All of our policies in the West to one degree or another have exacerbated this problem. I'm not saying that the reason Al-Baghdadi and his basically illiterate and religious zealot fighters who will strap on a suicide vest and go into the Radisson hotel, for example, in Amman and blow up a wedding party, I'm not saying that it's influencing them. But what I am saying is that it, our policies influence the 1.4-1.5 billion other Muslims in the world without whom, and without the money of whom, these people wouldn't be able to survive. That's whom we're looking for. We're looking to make sure that there is not one dollar more support for these people than there has to be.

Transcript Continued at:

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=15105

November 17, 2015

"From Pol Pot to ISIS: the Blood Never Dried"-- by John Pilger

November 17, 2015

In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”. As Barack Obama wages his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Francois Hollande promises a “merciless” attack on that the rubble of Syria, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery – including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields – I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

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ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of at least 700,000 people – in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda – like Pol Pot’s “jihadists” – seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. “Rebel” Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote, “The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy – and in particular our Middle East wars – had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here.”

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington, London and Paris who, in conspiring to destroy Iraq, Syria and Libya, committed an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in “our” societies, making accomplices of those who suppress this critical truth.

Continued at........

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/17/from-pol-pot-to-isis-the-blood-never-dried/

November 17, 2015

"Shadows of Algeria: the Lost Context of the Paris Attacks"--Robert Fisk

November 17, 2015
Shadows of Algeria: the Lost Context of the Paris Attacks

by Robert Fisk ( Fisk is an English writer and journalist from Maidstone, Kent. He has been Middle East correspondent of The Independent for more than twenty years, primarily based in Beirut. Fisk holds more British and international journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent and has been voted British International Journalist of the Year award seven times. He has published a number of books and reported on several wars and armed conflicts.)
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It wasn’t just one of the attackers who vanished after the Paris massacre. Three nations whose history, action–and inaction–help to explain the slaughter by Isis have largely escaped attention in the near-hysterical response to the crimes against humanity in Paris: Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

The French-Algerian identity of one of the attackers demonstrates how France’s savage 1956-62 war in Algeria continues to infect today’s atrocities. The absolute refusal to contemplate Saudi Arabia’s role as a purveyor of the most extreme Wahabi-Sunni form of Islam, in which Isis believes, shows how our leaders still decline to recognise the links between the kingdom and the organisation which struck Paris. And our total unwillingness to accept that the only regular military force in constant combat with Isis is the Syrian army – which fights for the regime that France also wants to destroy – means we cannot liaise with the ruthless soldiers who are in action against Isis even more ferociously than the Kurds.

Whenever the West is attacked and our innocents are killed, we usually wipe the memory bank. Thus, when reporters told us that the 129 dead in Paris represented the worst atrocity in France since the Second World War, they failed to mention the 1961 Paris massacre of up to 200 Algerians participating in an illegal march against France’s savage colonial war in Algeria. Most were murdered by the French police, many were tortured in the Palais des Sports and their bodies thrown into the Seine. The French only admit 40 dead. The police officer in charge was Maurice Papon, who worked for Petain’s collaborationist Vichy police in the Second World War, deporting more than a thousand Jews to their deaths.

Omar Ismail Mostafai, one of the suicide killers in Paris, was of Algerian origin – and so, too, may be other named suspects. Said and Cherif Kouachi, the brothers who murdered the Charlie Hebdo journalists, were also of Algerian parentage. They came from the five million-plus Algerian community in France, for many of whom the Algerian war never ended, and who live today in the slums of Saint-Denis and other Algerian banlieues of Paris. Yet the origin of the 13 November killers – and the history of the nation from which their parents came – has been largely deleted from the narrative of Friday’s horrific events. A Syrian passport with a Greek stamp is more exciting, for obvious reasons.

Continued at..........

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/17/the-shadow-of-algeria-the-lost-context-of-the-paris-attacks/

November 17, 2015

Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits Who Empowered ISIS

Whistleblowers are always accused of helping America’s enemies (top Nixon aides accused Daniel Ellsberg of being a Soviet spy and causing the deaths of Americans with his leak); it’s just the tactical playbook that’s automatically used. So it’s of course unsurprising that ever since Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing enabled newspapers around the world to report on secretly implemented programs of mass surveillance, he has been accused by “officials” and their various media allies of Helping The Terrorists™.

Still, I was a bit surprised just by how quickly and blatantly — how shamelessly — some of them jumped to exploit the emotions prompted by the carnage in France to blame Snowden: doing so literally as the bodies still lay on the streets of Paris. At first, the tawdry exploiters were the likes of crazed ex-intelligence officials (former CIA chief James Woolsey, who once said Snowden “should be hanged by his neck until he is dead” and now has deep ties to private NSA contractors, along with Iran–obsessed Robert Baer); former Bush/Cheney apparatchiks (ex-White House spokesperson and current Fox personality Dana Perino); right-wing polemicists fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism; and obscure Fox News comedians (Perino’s co-host). So it was worth ignoring save for the occasional Twitter retort.

But now we’ve entered the inevitable “U.S. Officials Say” stage of the “reporting” on the Paris attack — i.e., journalists mindlessly and uncritically repeat whatever U.S. officials whisper in their ear about what happened. So now credible news sites are regurgitating the claim that the Paris Terrorists were enabled by Snowden leaks — based on no evidence or specific proof of any kind, needless to say, but just the unverified, obviously self-serving assertions of government officials. But much of the U.S. media loves to repeat rather than scrutinize what government officials tell them to say. So now this accusation has become widespread and is thus worth examining with just some of the actual evidence.

One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, The Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to plot, so Western governments were able to track their plotting and disrupt at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise to the victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, 2008 in Mumbai, and April 2013 at the Boston Marathon. How did the multiple perpetrators of those well-coordinated attacks — all of which were carried out prior to Snowden’s June 2013 revelations — hide their communications from detection?

This is a glaring case where propagandists can’t keep their stories straight. The implicit premise of this accusation is that The Terrorists didn’t know to avoid telephones or how to use effective encryption until Snowden came along and told them. Yet we’ve been warned for years and years before Snowden that The Terrorists are so diabolical and sophisticated that they engage in all sorts of complex techniques to evade electronic surveillance.

Continued at:

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-about-paris-to-blame-snowden-distract-from-actual-culprits-who-empowered-isis/

November 17, 2015

No Security Can Stop Isis – The Bombers Will Always Get Through

No Security Can Stop Isis – The Bombers Will Always Get Through

Only the total destruction of the terrorist group, through US air support for Assad’s ground forces, can keep Europe safe

By Patrick Cockburn

The “Islamic State”, as ISIS styles itself, will be pleased with the outcome of its attacks in Paris. It has shown that it can retaliate with its usual savagery against a country that is bombing its territory and is a power to be feared at a time when it is under serious military pressure. The actions of just eight ISIS suicide bombers and gunmen are dominating the international news agenda for days on end.

There is not a lot that can be done about this. People are understandably eager to know the likelihood of their being machine-gunned the next time they sit in a restaurant or attend a concert in Paris or London.

But the apocalyptic tone of press coverage is exaggerated: the violence experienced hitherto in Paris is not comparable with Belfast and Beirut in the 1970s or Damascus and Baghdad today. Contrary to the hyperbole of wall-to-wall television coverage, the shock of living in a city being bombed soon wears off.

A further disadvantage flows from excessive rhetoric about the massacre: instead of the atrocities acting as an incentive for effective action, the angry words become a substitute for a real policy. After the Charlie Hebdo murders in January, 40 world leaders marched with linked arms through the streets of Paris proclaiming, among other things, that they would give priority to the defeat of ISIS and its al-Qaeda equivalents.

But, in practice, they did nothing of the sort...

Continued at........

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/paris-terror-attacks-no-security-can-stop-isis-the-bombers-will-always-get-through-a6735491.html