…by Jonas E. Alexis
Michael Isikoff is not entirely a bad journalist. To be fair, he has produced a good amount of journalism over the past few years. He was one of the people who exposed the Bush administration’s covert plan in Iraq in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.
But when it comes to the situation in Syria, it seems that Isikoff is clueless. Whether that is deliberate or not is hard to determine.
Isikoff has conducted a long interview with Bashar Assad during which numerous questions were thoroughly discussed. Isikoff confronted Assad about pictures of tortured and emaciated bodies in his prison cells, to which Assad declared, “Who verified the pictures? Who verified that they’re not edited and photo-shopped and so on?”
Here again we are not defending Assad. But from a legal point of view, those are important questions which must be answered in a thoroughly rational manner. Assad asked Isikoff point-blank: “Have YOU verified the photos?” Isikoff appeared to be quite cold and didn’t seem to know what to say. Assad added,
“Because you have it and because you mention it to an audience, you have to convince your audience. You have to verify who the people in the pictures are, where they are, and everything about them…These are allegations. We have to talk about concrete evidence. Anyone can say whatever he wants.”
Isikoff again appeared to be clueless, presumably because he thought Assad didn’t have the intellectual muster to handle the New World Order ideology. Then Isikoff moved on to cite the US State Department and the FBI to buttress his point. Isikoff was obviously making Assad’s job way too easy. Assad responded:
“When were your institutions honest about what’s happening in Syria? Never. If the FBI says something, it’s not evidence. The most important thing is if you take these photos to any court in your country [America], could they convict any criminal regarding this without knowing who committed the crime?
“If you don’t have the full picture, you cannot make judgment. It’s just propaganda. It’s just fake news. They want to demonize the Syrian war. In every war, you can have any individual crime. It happens all over the world. But is it the policy of the Syrian government?”
Again, Isikoff could not answer this perennial dilemma because the US has been implicated in funding terrorist cells in Syria in order to overthrow the Assad government for years. Isikoff, to my knowledge, hasn’t held the CIA and even the US government responsible for the debacle in the region. Even the Guardian itself reported that “the US fueled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq.”[1]
Isikoff wanted to slam Assad with a number of dubious accusations which he must concede that he could not prove. Isikoff simply cannot say that he doesn’t know that the US State Department, with the help of the CIA and other covert groups, has been responsible for spreading torturous activities for more than fifty years in numerous countries, going all the back to Vietnam in the 1960s.[2] The CIA, as Douglas Valentine has recently shows, is largely “organized crime.”[3]
Academic and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott of the University of California came to the same conclusions. He points out in many of his scholarly studies that the CIA and the Mafia have been spreading political terrorism through drugs in nearly all the five continents on the planet. Scott writes:
“In country after country, from Mexico and Honduras to Panama and Peru, the CIA helped set up or consolidate intelligence agencies that became forces of repression, and whose intelligence connections to other countries greased the way for illicit drug shipments.”[4]
So, for Isikoff to cite the CIA and the State the Department to prove the very covert activity that the same organizations were trying to prove in Syria is a circular argument. This is one reason why Isikoff struggled mightily in front of the camera to make a rational point. He was blinded by the New World Order ideology.
Isikoff again couldn’t answer Assad’s question when Assad asked him why the US has been fraternizing with Saudi Arabia, a terrorist state which is widely known for chopping people’s heads off in public. This is from Zionist outlet Newsweek: “47 Killed in Mass Execution in Saudi Arabia Including Shi’ite Cleric.”[5]
No one has ever challenged the Saudis because they have been following the New World Order ideology as well. In fact, it was Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir who declared in 2015 that there was “no future for Assad in Syria.”[6] The Israeli regime has propounded pretty much the same thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv3CPBzH5rU
Newsweek reported back in 2014 that “When It Comes to Beheadings, ISIS Has Nothing Over Saudi Arabia.” It stated:
“The escalation of the war against the Islamic State was triggered by widespread revulsion at the gruesome beheading of two American journalists, relayed on YouTube. Since then, two British aid workers have met a similar grisly fate. And another American has been named as next in line by his terrorist captors.
“Yet, for all the outrage these executions have engendered the world over, decapitations are routine in Saudi Arabia, America’s closest Arab ally, for crimes including political dissent—and the international press hardly seems to notice. In fact, since January, 59 people have had their heads lopped off in the kingdom, where “punishment by the sword” has been practiced for centuries.”[7]
Isikoff hasn’t interviewed the Saudis and asked them about their public execution. In fact, no Western leader has ever bothered to take the Saudis to task at all. It gets even more interesting: the Saudis couldn’t outsmart the US when it comes to torture. As prodigious scholar Rebecca Gordon has documented:
“For many years, the United States had secretly funded research on torture at U.S. and Canadian universities. One product of this research was the Central Intelligence Agency’s KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual with its sections covering ‘non-coercive’ and ‘coercive’ techniques, first printed in 1963….
“The United States had also provided covert training and support to torture regimes in other countries around the world—from Greece to Uruguay, Chile to El Salvador, Indonesia to Vietnam. The Phoenix Program, implemented during the Vietnam War by U.S. armed forces and the CIA, involved the torture and deaths of tens of thousands of Vietnamese, as part of the U.S. counterinsurgency project designed to break the will of the Viet Cong. In the testimony before Congress, military intelligence officer K. Milton Osborne provided some details of the methods used:
“‘The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the 6-inch canal of one of my detainees’ ears and the tapping through the brain until he dies. The starving to death of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages. They simply starved her to death in one of the hooches at that very counterintelligence headquarters.
“‘There were other methods of operation which they used for interrogation, such as the use of electronic gear such as sealed telephone attached to the genitals of both the men and women’s vagina and the man’s testicles, and wind the mechanism and create an electrical charge and shock them into submission.’”[8]
Between 1968 and 1971, the Phoenix Program was responsible for torturing and killing more than twenty thousand people,[9] many of whom had nothing to do with terrorism. These were not isolated cases. The CIA conducted these essentially diabolical operations “on several continents.”[10]
But all of a sudden New World Order agents are trying to blame Assad for any innocent death in Syria!
One needn’t be an intellectual to see that the New World Order ideology simply doesn’t add up. If this is still a little far-fetched, then again consider Abu Ghraib. We all know that torture was routine in Abu Ghraib, and forcing prisoners to have sex with one another and sodomizing teenagers was fair game. One prisoner testified that he saw one officer
“fu$king a kid, his age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [name blacked out], who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid’s ass. I couldn’t see the face of the kid because his face wasn’t in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures.”[11]
What’s more even interesting, “150 inmates were crammed into cells designed for 24.”[12] Abu Ghraib, as one writer put it, was “a hell-hole.”[13]
Torture was also routine in Afghanistan, where adolescents were beaten with hoses “and pipes and threats of sodomy.”[14] These acts were not done in the dark. Cambridge University published similar reports in a book that is more than 1200 pages long.[15]
Noted British journalist Robert Fisk showed that Abu Ghraib was largely an Israeli project.[16] The Israelis worked with US puppets to literally torture alleged terrorists without any evidence that those people were indeed terrorists.
But that again shouldn’t be a surprise. Israeli authorities were engaged in systematically torturing four to six thousand Palestinian prisoners every year,[17] and at least thirty thousand of those Palestinians had gone through this new gulag process since 1987.[18]
So, who is going to hold the Israeli regime responsible for this? If no one is allowed to challenge them on these issues, what moral right do NWO agents have to place a draconian rule on Assad? How is it that John McCain is still dancing like a bumbling idiot on stage? How about Lindsey Graham? The Neocons and their puppets? Who are those people really fooling?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c7p0W6Fhfk
[1] Seumas Milne, “Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq,” Guardian, June3, 2015.
[2] For a historical study on this, see Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 1990 and 2000).
[3] Douglas Valentine, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2016).
[4] Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1998), vii-viii.
[5] “47 Killed in Mass Execution in Saudi Arabia Including Shi’ite Cleric,” Newsweek, January 2, 2016.
[6] “‘No Future for Assad in Syria’: Saudi Foreign Minister,” Newsweek, September 30, 2015.
[7] Janine Di Giovanni, “When It Comes to Beheadings, ISIS Has Nothing Over Saudi Arabia,” Newsweek, October 14, 2014.
[8] Rebecca Gordon, Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1-2.
[9] Ibid., 2.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Cited in Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), 243.
[12] Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Owl Books, 2006), 132.
[13] Michael Haas, George W. Bush: War Criminal?: The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes (Westport: Praeger Pubishers, 2009), 66.
[14] See for example Alissa J. Rubin, “Anti-Torture Efforts in Afghanistan Failed, U.N. Says,” NY Times, January 20, 2013.
[15] Karen J. Geenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
[16] Robert Fisk, “Follow Torture Trail At Abu Ghraib,” Independent, May 26, 2004.
[17] See for example Dan Fesperman, “Israel Tortures Palestinian Prisoners Despite Peace Accords, Rights Group Says,” Baltimore Sun, June 15, 1994; see also Joel Greenberg, “Israel Reports Admit Abuses by Security Forces/Unsealed Probe of Shin Bet Details Harsh Treatment of Palestinians,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 10, 2000.
[18] Joel Greenberg, “Israel Rethinks Interrogation of Arabs,” NY Times, August 14, 1994.
Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
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