Leader of al-Qaida in Syria, Abu Mohammed al-Golani - the new leader of Syria They’ve done it again. America’s Central Intelligence Agency and it accomplices in the Pentagon and National Security Council has arranged the downfall of another government, this time in Syria. As with every regime change operation ever undertaken by this rogue outfit, it is a disaster. As usual, they have left a trail of death and destruction only to replace one unsavory leader with another that is far worse.
Ever since the CIA arranged to depose the freely elected prime minister of Iran in 1953, this clandestine band of killers has been interfering with elections, overthrowing governments, murdering foreign leaders, and funding illegal wars on behalf of American corporations and in the name of “anti-communism;” Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Congo (1961), Dominican Republic (1961), Cuba (1961), Chilé (1973), Nicaragua (1981), Afghanistan (1985 & 2001), Panama (1989), Somalia (1992), Iraq (1992-1996) to name just a few. This is to say nothing of the agency’s psychological experiments and torture of American citizens (MK-Ultra), illegal spying on Americans, and habitually lying to both congress and the president.
After the American-led NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 and especially after the declaration of the so-called “Global War on Terrorism,” the CIA and its partners at the Pentagon operate more openly. The CIA now has its own fleet of killer drones to carry out assassinations and other illegal acts of war worldwide.
This week, the CIA-led effort to remove Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria succeeded when Assad fled the capital for asylum in Russia. After a years long effort fighting an illegal proxy war 6,000 miles away, our government has managed to replace the tyrant Assad with Abu Mohammed al-Golani, a former insurgent fighter in Iraq and the leader of al-Qaida in Syria, the Jabhat al-Nusra. During the course of the civil war, this terrorist has changed his name to Ahmad al-Sharaa and the name of his organization to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), but he remains a jihadi terrorist and now, courtesy of the United States, he has his own country. The White House announced this as “… a fundamental act of justice. It’s a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country.”
The CIA operation to remove Assad, known as “Timber Sycamore,” was secretly approved by President Obama (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) in 2012 and funneled massive amounts of weaponry into the Syrian civil war with the goal of replacing the Assad regime with one of the “moderate” groups fighting the government. Needless to say, much of the weaponry wound up in the hands of ISIS and assisted that group in its reign of terror, including beheadings, torture, burning people alive, and sexual slavery among other crimes. The rest of the arms went to al-Nusra, and its constituent rebel groups; which is to say they went (knowingly) to al-Qaida. To date, the war has claimed the lives of more than 600,000 people, including at least 160,000 innocent civilians.
Though Timber Sycamore was ended by President Trump and he ordered all but 200 US troops out of Syria, the people who actually run the United States continued the war. They simply ignored the president’s order to withdraw and lied to him about how many troops were in Syria. While the story of our involvement in the Syrian conflict involves dozens of rebel groups, the fight against ISIS, the betrayal of our Kurdish allies, and much other intrigue, the result is the same as it has always been; idiotic blundering, thousands of innocent people dead, and a replacement tyrant worse than the one before.
The story is always the same. In 1973, the CIA arranged the murder of the head of the Chilean military and supported the subsequent coup against Chilé’s democratically elected President Allende who died during the military attack on the presidential palace. He was replaced with US-backed General Augusto Pinochet, who spent the next two decades as an iron-fisted dictator over the people of Chilé, torturing nearly 40,000 political prisoners and killing no fewer than 3,000 others.
The United States replaced the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iraq with the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who, with his US-trained Savak secret police, terrorized and tortured his people and political opponents for decades. This led to the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Iran hostage crisis, and inaugurated the past 40 years of Islamic state-sponsored terrorism.
President Truman ordered the first illegal foreign war when, in 1950, on his sole authority, he sent the US military to intervene in the Korean civil war. He killed 36,000 American soldiers and over 2 million civilians, but saved the South Koreans from communism, giving them instead continued rule by Syngman Rhee, who murdered more than 100,000 political opponents and interned 300,000 more in re-education camps, often for decades.
The CIA’s 1954 coup against Guatemala’s President Árbenz resulted in a 40-year civil war against successive US-backed military dictators, leaving more than 200,000 dead civilians.
America’s second full-scale unconstitutional war was its intervention in the Vietnamese civil war. There, the US arranged or authorized numerous coups and murders of successive, corrupt South Korean leaders. Our government killed 58,000 American soldiers and 1.3 million Vietnamese – mostly civilians. In the end, US-backed corrupt tyrants were replaced by a communist dictatorship.
The United States supported the Panamanian Dictator, Manuel Noriega (who worked for the CIA and DEA), until he stated to become disobedient. The US then invaded Panama in 1989 to arrest him on drug charges, killing 300 Panamanian soldiers and 2,000 civilians.
More recently, in Afghanistan, the CIA, Pentagon, and the foreign policy establishment spent $2.3 trillion dollars, expended the lives of more than 5,000 Americans, and killed roughly a quarter million Afghans and Pakistanis. The result? The Taliban terrorists that ran the country in 2001 are now ruling it again and they now have possession of billions of dollars worth of American weapons left behind in our retreat.
In 2011, the United States attacked Libya – a country we were not at war with – on false claims that the country’s leader Muammar Gaddafi was planning to massacre civilians in the ongoing civil war there. The result? Thousands of dead civilians, the gruesome beating and murder of Gaddafi, and the end of Libya as a functioning state. The people of Libya today live in an utterly lawless area where the state of Libya once stood. Libya is now a battleground for warlords and spawning ground for terrorist groups, where civilians are perpetually caught in the crossfire.
In every case where our CIA operatives and foreign policy elites have meddled in the affairs of other nations, the results have been embarrassing failures – like the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion and trying to murder Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar - or “successes” that resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians and elected officials, war, torture, murder, political repression and crushing tyranny. The US government continues to support murderous regimes like Saudi Arabia, where the US turns a blind eye to its political and cultural repression, its murder of political dissidents, and its genocidal war against Yemen.
The US Empire has more than 700 military bases on every continent save Antarctica and is actively engaged in political or military interventions in a host of countries, including Afghanistan, Cameroon, Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and, most ominously, Ukraine to name just a few. All of these not-so-secret wars are in direct contravention of our constitution, which gives congress sole power authorize acts of war.
The CIA-funded victory of al-Qaida in Syria will lead to more death and suffering for the Syrian people courtesy of the US government. It will become another failed state and a boiling cauldron of violence, terror, religious wars, and ethnic cleansing. Please, tell me again that the world “hates us for our freedom.”
Ever since the CIA arranged to depose the freely elected prime minister of Iran in 1953, this clandestine band of killers has been interfering with elections, overthrowing governments, murdering foreign leaders, and funding illegal wars on behalf of American corporations and in the name of “anti-communism;” Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Congo (1961), Dominican Republic (1961), Cuba (1961), Chilé (1973), Nicaragua (1981), Afghanistan (1985 & 2001), Panama (1989), Somalia (1992), Iraq (1992-1996) to name just a few. This is to say nothing of the agency’s psychological experiments and torture of American citizens (MK-Ultra), illegal spying on Americans, and habitually lying to both congress and the president.
After the American-led NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 and especially after the declaration of the so-called “Global War on Terrorism,” the CIA and its partners at the Pentagon operate more openly. The CIA now has its own fleet of killer drones to carry out assassinations and other illegal acts of war worldwide.
This week, the CIA-led effort to remove Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria succeeded when Assad fled the capital for asylum in Russia. After a years long effort fighting an illegal proxy war 6,000 miles away, our government has managed to replace the tyrant Assad with Abu Mohammed al-Golani, a former insurgent fighter in Iraq and the leader of al-Qaida in Syria, the Jabhat al-Nusra. During the course of the civil war, this terrorist has changed his name to Ahmad al-Sharaa and the name of his organization to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), but he remains a jihadi terrorist and now, courtesy of the United States, he has his own country. The White House announced this as “… a fundamental act of justice. It’s a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country.”
The CIA operation to remove Assad, known as “Timber Sycamore,” was secretly approved by President Obama (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) in 2012 and funneled massive amounts of weaponry into the Syrian civil war with the goal of replacing the Assad regime with one of the “moderate” groups fighting the government. Needless to say, much of the weaponry wound up in the hands of ISIS and assisted that group in its reign of terror, including beheadings, torture, burning people alive, and sexual slavery among other crimes. The rest of the arms went to al-Nusra, and its constituent rebel groups; which is to say they went (knowingly) to al-Qaida. To date, the war has claimed the lives of more than 600,000 people, including at least 160,000 innocent civilians.
Though Timber Sycamore was ended by President Trump and he ordered all but 200 US troops out of Syria, the people who actually run the United States continued the war. They simply ignored the president’s order to withdraw and lied to him about how many troops were in Syria. While the story of our involvement in the Syrian conflict involves dozens of rebel groups, the fight against ISIS, the betrayal of our Kurdish allies, and much other intrigue, the result is the same as it has always been; idiotic blundering, thousands of innocent people dead, and a replacement tyrant worse than the one before.
The story is always the same. In 1973, the CIA arranged the murder of the head of the Chilean military and supported the subsequent coup against Chilé’s democratically elected President Allende who died during the military attack on the presidential palace. He was replaced with US-backed General Augusto Pinochet, who spent the next two decades as an iron-fisted dictator over the people of Chilé, torturing nearly 40,000 political prisoners and killing no fewer than 3,000 others.
The United States replaced the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iraq with the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who, with his US-trained Savak secret police, terrorized and tortured his people and political opponents for decades. This led to the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Iran hostage crisis, and inaugurated the past 40 years of Islamic state-sponsored terrorism.
President Truman ordered the first illegal foreign war when, in 1950, on his sole authority, he sent the US military to intervene in the Korean civil war. He killed 36,000 American soldiers and over 2 million civilians, but saved the South Koreans from communism, giving them instead continued rule by Syngman Rhee, who murdered more than 100,000 political opponents and interned 300,000 more in re-education camps, often for decades.
The CIA’s 1954 coup against Guatemala’s President Árbenz resulted in a 40-year civil war against successive US-backed military dictators, leaving more than 200,000 dead civilians.
America’s second full-scale unconstitutional war was its intervention in the Vietnamese civil war. There, the US arranged or authorized numerous coups and murders of successive, corrupt South Korean leaders. Our government killed 58,000 American soldiers and 1.3 million Vietnamese – mostly civilians. In the end, US-backed corrupt tyrants were replaced by a communist dictatorship.
The United States supported the Panamanian Dictator, Manuel Noriega (who worked for the CIA and DEA), until he stated to become disobedient. The US then invaded Panama in 1989 to arrest him on drug charges, killing 300 Panamanian soldiers and 2,000 civilians.
More recently, in Afghanistan, the CIA, Pentagon, and the foreign policy establishment spent $2.3 trillion dollars, expended the lives of more than 5,000 Americans, and killed roughly a quarter million Afghans and Pakistanis. The result? The Taliban terrorists that ran the country in 2001 are now ruling it again and they now have possession of billions of dollars worth of American weapons left behind in our retreat.
In 2011, the United States attacked Libya – a country we were not at war with – on false claims that the country’s leader Muammar Gaddafi was planning to massacre civilians in the ongoing civil war there. The result? Thousands of dead civilians, the gruesome beating and murder of Gaddafi, and the end of Libya as a functioning state. The people of Libya today live in an utterly lawless area where the state of Libya once stood. Libya is now a battleground for warlords and spawning ground for terrorist groups, where civilians are perpetually caught in the crossfire.
In every case where our CIA operatives and foreign policy elites have meddled in the affairs of other nations, the results have been embarrassing failures – like the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion and trying to murder Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar - or “successes” that resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians and elected officials, war, torture, murder, political repression and crushing tyranny. The US government continues to support murderous regimes like Saudi Arabia, where the US turns a blind eye to its political and cultural repression, its murder of political dissidents, and its genocidal war against Yemen.
The US Empire has more than 700 military bases on every continent save Antarctica and is actively engaged in political or military interventions in a host of countries, including Afghanistan, Cameroon, Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and, most ominously, Ukraine to name just a few. All of these not-so-secret wars are in direct contravention of our constitution, which gives congress sole power authorize acts of war.
The CIA-funded victory of al-Qaida in Syria will lead to more death and suffering for the Syrian people courtesy of the US government. It will become another failed state and a boiling cauldron of violence, terror, religious wars, and ethnic cleansing. Please, tell me again that the world “hates us for our freedom.”
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