Today in tyranny we’ve got three stories on the rapidly increasing authoritarian abuses in western “free democracies”.
Let’s dig in.
1. Grayzone reporter detained by British counter-terrorism police for doing journalism.
The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg was detained by “six anonymous plainclothes counter-terror officers” who “grilled him for over five hours about his reporting” upon returning to Britain on the 17th of May, according to a new report by Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal.
Blumenthal reports that Klarenberg was asked many questions about The Grayzone and his work with the independent outlet, saying police “seized the journalist’s electronic devices and SD cards, fingerprinted him, took DNA swabs, and photographed him intensively,” threatening him with arrest if he didn’t comply.
Blumenthal writes that the police action was likely a retaliation for Klarenberg’s reporting for the outlet, which has angered British officials and establishment media figures with the inconvenient information it has reported about their behavior:
Klarenberg’s interrogation appears to be London’s way of retaliating for the journalist’s blockbuster reports exposing major British and US intelligence intrigues. In the past year alone, Klarenberg revealed how a cabal of Tory national security hardliners violated the Official Secrets Act to exploit Brexit and install Boris Johnson as prime minister. In October 2022, he earned international headlines with his exposé of British plans to bomb the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian Federation. Then came his report on the CIA’s recruitment of two 9/11 hijackers this April, a viral sensation that generated massive social media attention.
Among Klarenberg’s most consequential exposés was his June 2022 report unmasking British journalist Paul Mason as a UK security state collaborator hellbent on destroying The Grayzone and other media outlets, academics, and activists critical of NATO’s role in Ukraine.
Asserting that Klarenberg did nothing more nefarious than engaging in “the same journalistic practice that the West’s most prominent legacy newspapers, from The New York Times to The Washington Post, depend on to break news themselves,” Blumenthal says it appears that “British authorities did not detain Klarenberg for any legal breaches, but because he reported factual stories that exposed the national security state’s own violations of both domestic and international law, as well as the malign plots of its media lackeys.”
Blumenthal himself was subjected to legal harassment and intimidation in the United States a few years back, arrested and charged with having committed “assault” while reporting on imperial efforts to drive the Venezuelan government out of its embassy in Washington DC. The charges were later dropped.
The Grayzone has been doing some of the best independent reporting in alternative media over the last few years, and should wear its now-evident status as a thorn in the empire’s side with pride.
2. South Australia passes draconian anti-protest law.
Reacting to recent inconvenient demonstrations by environmental activists, the state of South Australia has just rapidly shoved through legislation — without consulting the public — to exponentially increase the penalties for unauthorized protesting. Demonstrators will now face up to three months in jail and fines of $50,000 if they are deemed guilty of the extremely vague offense of “obstructing a public place” with their protesting.
Therefore, what might be described as ‘public interest journalism’, which involves the leaking of confidential documents, is only valid if it compliments one side of the argument as opposed to the other. Deception, censorship and state-led misinformation campaigns are never to be queried if the UK or the US or behind them, while the distinction between ‘criminal’ and ‘whistleblower’ is upheld completely according to preference.
is a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations with a primary focus on East Asia.
On some platforms, whistleblowing is only considered an acceptable form of journalism when it exposes enemies of the West. Twitter’s labelling of a Grayzone story that reflected badly on Britain shows the double standards at play.
Earlier this week, journalist Max Blumenthal published a series of leaked documents from the British Foreign Office on his news website the Grayzone, revealing that the BBC and the Reuters Foundation had participated in a covert programme targeting Russia and its neighbours, seeking to push political change within the country.
Former Labour MP Chris Williamson commented on the findings, noting, “These revelations show that when MPs were railing about Russia, British agents were using the BBC and Reuters to deploy precisely the same tactics that politicians and media commentators were accusing Russia of using.”
For those familiar with the BBC and its history as an extension for British foreign policy goals, the leaks are not a surprise. However, that does not mean the news was met with a warm welcome.
Shunned by the mainstream media, the Grayzone report was subsequently targeted by Twitter, with each link being tagged with a warning stating: “These materials may have been obtained through hacking.”
The warning led to an information page stating: “The use of hacks and hacking to exfiltrate information from private computer systems can be used to manipulate the public conversation.”
Although the warning was not carried on some subsequent retweets, at the time of publication it was still present on Grayzone’s original tweet.
Twitter’s accusation is a classic case of it jumping to conclusions, as there is nothing at all to suggest the leaks were a product of hacking. However, this attitude is a direct manifestation of the enormous double standards at play in response to this kind of journalism.
Whistleblowing and leaks which reveal secrets from enemy states constitute a form of journalism and reporting which deserves to be praised. But to many governments in the West, especially those in the United States and the United Kingdom, leaking is considered out of bounds when they are on the receiving end. It is as if the standards they preach to other countries – in particular, transparency and freedom of information – suddenly don’t count.
In exploring this phenomenon, the cases of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are good places to start. If these men were Chinese, Russian or Iranian, they would be widely celebrated and lauded by the mainstream media as heroes and martyrs who have been subjected to state oppression for simply daring to reveal the truth, as was the case with doctor Li Wenliang and ‘citizen journalist’ Zhang Zhan in Wuhan.
Yet because Assange and Snowden are Western, and in turn directly challenged the US-led security establishment with their leaks on surveillance and various atrocities, they are treated differently, as criminals and fugitives. The mainstream media minimize the coverage accordingly, and make sure their cause or work cannot gain public sympathy. State action against them is not given scrutiny.
In the simplest terms, we see a scenario where whistleblowing against the US and its allies is bad, but whistleblowing against designated enemies is good. And so, Twitter is following suit with this logic in its decision to now target articles by the Grayzone as apparent ‘hacking’.
It perfectly illustrates this very binary mode of thought that those who leak documents against the British government are not fuelled by a desire to advocate truth or transparency, but malicious motivations to spread misinformation and influence public opinion.
Is Twitter saying that it is best the public don’t know how the BBC is essentially being weaponized as a front for British foreign policy? That the notion of public interest essentially does not matter if a given revelation has political ramifications that might be considered undesirable for the West? Or that other journalism is not designed to influence views on a particular subject? So, some secrets are better kept?
Twitter itself is becoming an increasingly unreliable platform on this front. Donald Trump’s presidency has changed the game, from beginning to end. The enormous controversy of the so-called ‘Russiagate scandal’ and then the Capitol riot in January proved to be two enormous turning points which have tipped the platform towards growing regulation and outright censorship.
This would be understandable, if it were not so one-sided. The site’s proliferation of ‘state affiliated media’ labels – which unfairly target certain countries, and not others – as well as its warning labels, are all directly consolidating a status quo advocated by Western powers that only they possess a ‘valid’ notion of truth. In turn, everyone who seeks to criticize their narratives is simply promoting falsehoods and is fuelled by bad intent.
Therefore, what might be described as ‘public interest journalism’, which involves the leaking of confidential documents, is only valid if it compliments one side of the argument as opposed to the other. Deception, censorship and state-led misinformation campaigns are never to be queried if the UK or the US or behind them, while the distinction between ‘criminal’ and ‘whistleblower’ is upheld completely according to preference.
These documents were a massive discovery. If China had been caught doing the same thing it would be front-page news, but instead we have Twitter trying to bury the truth. The Grayzone findings deserve to be shared as widely as possible.
Blumenthal’s arrest is another example of the legal harassment of US government critics, including WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning
Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, a prominent journalistic critic of US policy toward Venezuela, was arrested by DC police on Friday, October 25, in connection with a protest at the Venezuelan embassy, and held incommunicado. But if you rely on corporate media, or even leading “press freedom” groups, you haven’t heard about this troubling encroachment on freedom of the press.
Blumenthal is a bestselling author whose work has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, CJR, The Nation and Salon. DC police arrested him at his home on a five-month-old arrest warrant, charging him with simple assault for his attempt to deliver food to the besieged Venezuelan embassy; he was held for two days, and for the first 36 hours was not allowed to speak with a lawyer. (In an interview with FAIR, Blumenthal noted that keeping arrestees—generally poor and African-American—from speaking with lawyers or family is par for the course in the DC criminal justice system.) As of this writing, there has been no mention of Blumenthal’s arrest in outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post and Reuters that constantly publish Venezuela-related content, or by the big “press freedom” NGOs.
When freelance US journalist Cody Weddle was detained in Venezuela for 12 hours, it made headlines in the New York Times (3/6/19), Washington Post (3/6/19), Miami Herald (3/6/19), USA Today (3/6/19), Guardian (3/6/19), UK Telegraph (3/6/19), NPR (3/10/19), ABC (3/9/19) and Reuters (3/7/19). That’s not exhaustive, but you get the picture.
In Weddle’s case, the human rights industry also responded immediately. Jose Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch tweeted about Cody Weddle’s detention, as did Reporters without Borders (RSF). The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) also put out a statement immediately (3/6/19). There has been nothing from them about Blumenthal.
The two-hour detention of Univision’s Jorge Ramos in Venezuela was likewise big news. In fact, RSF was outraged that Cody Weddle’s detention happened “barely a week” after the Ramos incident.
Nobody should have a problem with Weddle’s arrest or Ramos’ detention getting the widespread attention they did. (The content in the reports about Venezuela is a separate issue.) What should anger anybody who isn’t consumed with hypocrisy is the point Ben Norton, writing in Grayzone (10/28/19), made about Blumenthal’s arrest:
If this had happened to a journalist in Venezuela, every Western human rights NGO and news wire would be howling about Maduro’s authoritarianism. It will be revealing to see how these same elements react to a clear-cut case of political repression in their own backyard.
Blumenthal’s arrest is another example of the legal harassment of US government critics, including WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning–whose plights have similarly been neglected by Western media and NGOs that claim to support press freedom (FAIR.org, 11/3/18, 4/1/19).
Several months ago, activists invited by the Venezuela government stayed in the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC, for over a month until they were finally evicted by police on May 24. The presence of the activists delayed a takeover of the embassy by representatives of the Trump-appointed Venezuelan government-in-exile led by Juan Guaidó. The majority of the world’s governments do not recognize Guaidó; that was dramatically highlighted on October 17 when Venezuela’s was voted onto the UN Human Rights Council despite US “lobbying” (i.e., bribes and threats).
Nevertheless, Trump’s recognition of Guaidó in January 2019 was the excuse for intensifying economic sanctions that had already killed thousands of people by the end of 2018. (Incidentally, Jorge Ramos’ two-hour “detention” also received more Western media attention than the study showing the already-lethal impact of Trump’s sanctions—FAIR.org, 6/14/19)…
The lack of coverage of his arrest “is totally consistent with media coverage of the siege of the Venezuelan embassy,” Blumenthal told FAIR. “The violence, racism, sexism of the Venezuelan opposition—none of it was reported in the mainstream US press.” Aside from alternative outlets like Democracy Now! (10/30/19) and the World Socialist Website (10/30/19), one had to turn to Russian state media to find coverage of Blumenthal’s arrest. A Sputnik article (10/30/19) about the case cited damagingexposésGrayzone has published about Guaidó inner circle, one of which recently led to the resignation of right-wing economist Ricardo Hausmann from Guaidó’s shadow administration.
Here’s an idea for media outlets and NGOs concerned about the appeal of Russian public relations efforts: start doing your jobs by holding your own authoritarian politicians and politicized police forces to account.
Three American journalists decided to do what many of their colleagues have done since the outbreak of the proxy war on the Syrian government: they traveled to the war-torn country to report what’s happening from the ground. But unlike the reporters who have made a name for themselves traipsing through some of the oldest cities in the world recently put under occupation by a miscellany of jihadist groups, these three journalists reported from areas under the control of the government.
For the industry of experts and journalists giving media cover to Syria’s jihadist insurgency, the three of them had once again crossed a line. And so the campaign to deplatform journalists Rania Khalek, Max Blumenthal, and Anya Parampil was renewed, beginning with false accusations that the trip was financed by the Syrian government.
Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, told MintPress News why he went to Syria in the first place:
The Western public has been subjected for eight years to an industrial-grade information war designed to sabotage their critical faculties and inculcate support for military interventions, proxy wars and economic sanctions.
The point is, according to Blumenthal:
To break the information blockade by going on the ground in countries targeted for regime change and ripping the curtain off of elaborate regime-change propaganda constructs. I accepted an invitation to attend the General Trade Union Forum in Syria with that mission in mind, and was able to go off on my own for several days in and around Damascus and hear from actual Syrians about their experiences during the war and how the escalating U.S. economic war was darkening their future.
At this point, the military conflict is virtually over, but U.S. sanctions are doing enormous damage to working class Syrians, while failing to scathe the government and its inner circle.”
Behind the campaign to silence these critical, anti-war journalists was the same cast of characters that have become notorious in progressive circles for the viciousness of their attacks — attacks against Khalek and Blumenthal in particular, but also against anyone willing to come out against regime change in Syria.
Khalek told MintPress News:
The harassment these people inspire and participate in is relentless. It varies from libel and smears to attacks on my physical safety. I’ve been doxxed and had my livelihood threatened. I’ve been deplatformed and fired. That is their goal.”
The tactics employed to silence these reporters have included death and rape threats, spurious lawsuits, threatening phone calls, pressure campaigns to have them fired, and persistent harassment against any institutions publishing their work or hosting their talks, books, or documentary tours. Parampil, who also reports at The Grayzone, told MintPress:
Twitter may seem like the world to some, but when I’m out in the field meeting real people I find that my position represents the majority. Whether in Syria, the U.S. or Venezuela, I’ve found a lot of support and an audience that is hungry for the kind of reporting we do… As long as I can continue to speak with the working people of the world and punch holes in the corporate, pro-war narrative, I am happy. Everything else is background noise.”
But over the week, the illiberal McCarthyite campaign reached a new level of depravity, when prominent media personalities began circulating a forged email accusing Khalek of being paid by a Syrian businessman on the U.S. sanctions list.
“I’m not at all surprised that those attacking me have resorted to posting fake emails. They are nasty and sleazy in their attacks; they continue to sink lower and lower,” Khalek said.
Introducing the Usual Suspects
While this informal group seeking to take down alternative journalists come from an array of think tank and media institutions, many of them — including artist Molly Crabapple and journalists Danny Gold and Oz Katerji — were associated with VICE News, an outlet that celebrated the NATO-backed jihadist assassination of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and whitewashed neo-Nazi overtones out of its work in support of Ukraine’s Euromaidan insurgency. Those profiled in this section have participated in the attacks against the trio of journalists on Twitter.
Khalek told MintPress:
I’m being accused of supporting the Syrian government because I challenged the U.S. regime-change machine’s narrative and policy that sought to collapse the Syrian state and hand it over to a bunch of Islamist gangs, as was done with Libya. Anyone who questions the mainstream pro-war consensus should expect to be smeared and libeled. That is what the other side does to maintain hegemony over the discourse.
My approach to covering Syria has been my approach to all subjects: to challenge power, to challenge propaganda, and to challenge war They want to hide the reality that I’m trying to expose.”
But chief among the gaggle of prominent young regime-change propagandists is Charles Lister, whose role at the Middle East Institute (MEI) think tank in Washington has seen him vet so-called “moderate rebels” who have formed alliances with al-Qaeda. MEI, for its part, is funded by the United Arab Emirates, a Gulf petro-monarchy that has helped supply al-Qaeda with weapons in Syria. For Lister’s part, he has maintained that “al-Qaeda has really got it right” in Syria. He, like many of the other people who pounced on Khalek over the fake email, spent years promoting a now-suspended Twitter account, @ShamiWitness, as an expert on the Syrian conflict. The account, it turns out, belonged to ISIS and was used to recruit young men on the platform.
The email purporting to show Khalek on the payroll of an individual sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department was published by a Syrian regime-change activist based out of Quebec named Noor Nahas. Its publication by Nahas appears to coincide with a hit piece in Tablet Magazine against an NGO worker in Damascus who has advocated for ceasefire agreements in the country, who is also accused of receiving illicit funding in the fake email.
Lister promoted both the hit piece and the forged email on his Twitter account, but deleted all of the tweets focusing on the fake email. In those deleted tweets, Lister could hardly contain himself and even attempted to tag the U.S. Treasury on Twitter in order to alert them to the alleged violation of U.S. sanctions by Khalek, an American citizen and journalist. After deleting the tweets, Lister removed himself from the discussion.
God, I’m tired of all this social media nonsense. Leave me out of it.
Journalist Danny Gold, another former promoter of the @ShamiWitness account, retweeted a number of attacks against Khalek over the forged email, on one occasion writing “this thread is a wild ride, and leads to documented evidence of some of the favorite Assadist reporters taking money from the regime to whitewash their crimes.”
Gold is infamous as among the most vicious of his associates. But he is no impartial voice on the Syrian conflict, given his affinity for having geeky conversations about a high-fantasy television series with al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al Nusra.
Molly Crabapple has cultivated a reputation as a bohemian artist fighting for freedom alongside the world’s oppressed. She got started with the Occupy Wall Street movement, but over the years a pattern emerged wherein she repeatedly championed State Department causes and narratives. Over the years she has painted portraits of everyone from Oz Katerji; to the neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer, or “Weev;” to Syrian refugees.
Crabapple was indeed so pained by the plight of Syrians that she once doxxed a United Nations aid worker in Erbil, Iraq for writing about the war. She has also falsely accused this reporter of participating in a protest against the White Helmets that I was there to cover.
Crabapple falsely accused Parampil, Khalek, and Blumenthal of “prancing around Syria on a government luxury tour,” calling it “some Goebbels shit.”
Oz Katerji — like Crabapple, who is a former burlesque dancer — seems to have little prior background in international affairs. Katerji, once a Dubstep artist, went from writing profiles for VICE of “The Strangely Uplifting Tale of the Cam-Girl with No Vagina” to articles like “The Syrian Regime Is Using DIY Barrel Bombs Against Its Citizens.” For that piece, he interviewed Elliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, an outlet funded by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. Katerji’s own ties to Bellingcat, where he was considered an official contributor, were left unmentioned in the piece.
Another Bellingcat member, senior investigator Nick Waters, homed in on a picture of Khalek in Damascus, writing that she was posing for the camera “only a couple of degrees away from the infamous Saydnaya prison, where tens of thousands of people have been tortured and executed.”
But that widely reported figure (it even made its way into the New York Times and an Amnesty International report) is credited to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a state-funded pro-opposition front group based out of Qatar, a country that has also fueled the crisis in Syria. The Syrian Network for Human Rights has lobbied the U.S. for military intervention.
Katerji has also promoted the ISIS Twitter recruitment account. As Kevin Gosztola points out at Shadowproof, Katerji has sworn to “never rest while” journalists countering the narrative on Syria “are given platforms or publishing opportunities.”
Idrees Ahmad is another journalist who has spent the past few days on Twitter relentlessly attacking Khalek, Blumenthal and Parampil, even getting a piece published on al-Jazeera attacking the trio. That’s the Idrees Ahmad whose blog has published attacks on this outlet and this reporter for raising questions about Jorge Ramos and his interview with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro; a story later vindicated as multiple holes emerged in Ramos’ story. Ahmad, unsurprisingly, also promoted the @ShamiWitness account.
CNN reporter Clarissa Ward tweeted about the trip:
Started to read a certain ‘journalist’s’ thread from inside Damascus this AM, then found myself getting palpitations which progressed into spasms of rage. How can anyone be so blindly credulous? Are narcotics involved? It is such a disgrace.”
Ward’s fury may have been over the perceived credulty of the reporters on the trip, but it is more likely that she has an axe to grind against Blumenthal, who exposed how she had previously hired al-Qaeda propagandist Bilal Abdul Kareem to guide her through jihadist strongholds, where the “heroes” are “on the ground.” Kareem’s propaganda is so overt that he has even whitewashed a group of men on motorcycles waving ISIS flags as “civilians protesting.”
Alexander Reid Ross — a geography teacher who has made a name for himself in anti-fascist circles by attacking the likes of Blumenthal and Khalek over nebulous ties to fascists, using the tired “red-brown” technique — also participated in the Twitter pile-on.
Blumenthal told MintPress:
My ability to convey this reality back to the U.S. public was apparently such a threat to an unusually vocal echo chamber of regime-change fanatics that I was branded a Nazi (by Molly Crabapple), a drug addict (by a CNN correspondent), and told that I should have my life ruined (by a reactionary suburban doofus-turned-professional white Salafi ally). Their attacks were part and parcel of the Western campaign to isolate Syrians from the rest of the world, and all because their government held off a multi-billion dollar proxy war that would have transformed their country into an even more harrowing version of Libya if it had succeeded.”
Lamentably, VICE News is not the only hip, left-leaning news outlet decidedly on the side of regime change in Syria. Mariam Elba, a fact checker at The Intercept, an outlet owned by a billionaire oligarch with prior ties to human trafficking, scoffed at Blumenthal and Khalek’s trip. “Neither of them speak Arabic, yet they claim to be ‘talking’ to many Syrians there.”
This is yet another false allegation, as Khalek does speak Arabic.
Breaking the media blockade
For Blumenthal, Khalek and Parampil, all of this — as well as the lawsuits and deplatforming campaigns — is a distraction from doing real, independent investigative journalism. In Syria, where Western reporters have flocked to Islamist-held regions, the story that has not been told, in their view, is that of the average Syrian. According to Parampil:
This group of Syrians represents the vast majority of the country, despite the fact that we never hear from them in corporate media. It is my job, as a U.S. journalist with the privilege of working independently, to visit countries and speak to people impacted by the policies of Washington, particularly those who are excluded from the mainstream narrative. Unless we hear from these people, the U.S. public will be more willing to support military and economic war against the Syrian people. That is why CNN and other outlets act as though they’re invisible. The media has been weaponized against the Syrian people.”
Khalek expanded upon the situation many Syrians currently face, arguing that people are much safer now that the fighting has mostly ended and the government came out with a victory:
Except for Idlib, the bombs and mortars have stopped falling, allowing people to return to some sense of normalcy. But things aren’t normal, because the U.S. is economically suffocating the country with crippling sanctions that have devalued the Syrian currency and made it impossible for people to rebuild or plan for a decent future. Everyone wants to leave Syria because of the economic strangulation. The war on Syria continues. In place of funding proxy death squads, the U.S. has launched a campaign of economic terrorism against the country.”
Asked what lessons she took away from her trip to the country, Parampil said:
I was most shocked to see how close foreign-backed extremist militants came to taking control of the Syrian capital. They were meters away from capturing the old city, the ancient heart of Damascus. When I rode into Damascus for the first time and saw the large Syrian flag still waving above the city, I was reminded that many of my colleagues in U.S. media were supporting a war that would have seen that banner replaced with one belonging to ISIS or Al-Qaeda.
The fact they failed is something all of humanity should celebrate. I spoke with people who described the hell they were forced to live in under the rule of foreign-backed militants. They were happy to be liberated by the Syrian military. They have every right to be heard in U.S. media, which is why I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to travel to Syria and meet them at the invitation of the country’s working people.”
In a wildly byzantine and absurdly self-defeating redux of the 2003 Iraq War folly and the 1980s anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, the US again fueled Islamism in the region before subsequently turning on the Frankenstein’s monster of Sunni jihadism to justify “forever war” anew. In retrospect, it was almost as if Washington wanted Syria to collapse, for the war to rage on indefinitely, and for a new, bigger, Islamist bogeyman to rise like the mythical phoenix
If Gabbard and Kucinich were right, it’s clear who was very, very wrong: the late and now canonized John McCain
…Yet, as journalist Max Blumenthal made clear in two illuminating chapters of his latest book, “The Management of Savagery,” the U.S. and its European and Arab “partners” spent most of the brutal civil war backing the very Islamists that most threatened America. As such, the Western-Gulf alliance enabled, even caused, the “Talibanization” of huge swaths of Syria, especially in the oil-rich east.
It worked like this: The CIA set up shop across the border in Turkey and Barack Obama authorized $500 million in military aid—including anti-armor TOW missiles—which ended up in the hands of the Nusra Front and an array of other Islamist groups. At the peak of the mission, $1 in every $15 the CIA spent went to the Syria assistance mission. The blowback, so to speak, was the resurrection of al-Qaida, the empowerment of Islamic State, and the turning of much of Syria into a jihadi stronghold.
It all bore disturbing similarity to Operation Cyclone, the failed, 9/11-catalyzing, CIA assistance mission to the equally theocratic Afghan mujahedeen in its battle against the Soviets from 1979 to 1988. In this tragic counterproductive redux, Turkey stood in as Pakistan, once the way station for arms and cash to the mujahedeen. The US, Western Europe and the Gulf States performed an encore as the largest backers of rebels, and all the blowback was essentially the same—if no worse—in the Syria reprise.
This time around, Israel counterintuitively lent a hand to empower the Nusra Front and even Islamic State. It bombed Syrian targets over the years and funded some Islamists along its Golan Heights border. Indeed, one right-wing, Netanyahu-allied scholar published an op-ed titled, “The Destruction of the Islamic State Is a Mistake.” What’s more, as a former Israeli defense minister emphatically stated in 2016, “In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State.” This was all patently ridiculous, since Islamic State’s ideology poses an enormous threat to Israel’s future, whereas Iran is a boxed-in, sanctions-riddled, non-nuclear power. Yet it reflects exactly the prevailing Israeli—and, by extension, American and Gulf State—strategic dogma in the region.
US policymakers, furthermore, had ample evidence early in the civil war that the rebels were infused with and rapidly dominated by Islamists. Even hyperconservative Defense Intelligence Agency head (and later Trump national security adviser) Michael Flynn reported this, as did the United Nations. It all pointed to the massive empowerment of Islamists, including Islamic State.
Gabbard knew this—saw it, even—from the start. Anyone with a willingness to study recent history should have, though most didn’t. She wasn’t exactly alone, of course. Reliably antiwar Dennis Kucinich, a former Ohio representative, once flippantly, but astutely, asked whether US aid to rebels and strikes on Assad didn’t essentially turn the US into “al-Qaida’s Air Force.” More surprisingly, in what was, at the time, considered one his notorious gaffes, then-Vice President Joe Biden admitted that “[t]he problem is our allies [the Gulf States and Turkey] … they poured in [money and weapons] … and the people who were being supplied were Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” For this nugget of truth, Uncle Joe was sent on an “apology tour” around the region.
If Gabbard and Kucinich were right, it’s clear who was very, very wrong: the late and now canonized John McCain…
All in all, Gabbard was pilloried precisely because she was uncomfortably and rationally correct about the rebels and the course of the war in Syria. Gabbard is no doubt imperfect, but she is remarkably consistent—even when it is politically unpalatable—in her anti-interventionist stances. In this, she’s all but alone in the bloated Democratic primary field; that’s exactly why she’s the most intriguing presidential hopeful. It’s also partly why she’s unlikely to last much longer in the race to the top.
An alliance of beltway insiders, interventionist think-tankers, corporate arms dealers and mainstream Democratic Party stalwarts feel they have to sink her campaign. It must be stillborn, in fact, because they fear her and all she stands for. She seemed to know that while Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s ayatollahs aren’t exactly America’s friends, they did, and do, possess goals in common with the US The Assad-backing coalition also fights terrorists, both native Syrian and transnational. Furthermore, though the generals and admirals will never admit it, the SAA and Russian air force acted as a veritable anvil to the US and Kurdish hammer that rolled back Islamic State in its eastern Syrian stronghold.
To further disturb reflexively liberal friends, Donald Trump—though he did meaninglessly bomb a Syrian runway, leading CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria to declare The Donald presidential—seems to also partly recognize the real score in Syria. Though 2,000 US troops foolishly remain in place in the country, he hasn’t escalated conflict with Russia per se and appears to understand the common goals between the otherwise implacable opponents.
Nevertheless, the situation on the ground in Syria is dangerous as all hell. Through its counterproductive policies, Washington ended up with the worst of all worlds: a costly war with an empowered Islamic State, a hair-trigger standoff with Russia and Iran along the Euphrates River, and another perilous military footprint in an unstable Mideast quagmire. Bravo, America!…
All told, at present, Islamic State is hardly gone and is again gaining strength; Russia, Assad and Iran hold all the high cards in the civil war; US troops remain enmeshed in the East; and the Kurdish question has yet to be solved (and could even lead to a war with Turkey). Moreover, an entire people, and a region, are once more shattered.
That, as recent history demonstrates, makes America less safe and has led to hundreds of thousands of dead brown bodies, for which the US public hardly cares. Which means Tulsi Gabbard, almost alone, was right from the start. And that’s precisely why America’s perpetual warfare state must destroy her.
MCViewPoint 