NEO: Criminal Syndicates, not politics, drives Middle East Wars

by Gordon Duff, with New Eastern Outlook, Moscow

– First published 25 July 2019 –

In 2015, I addressed a security conference in Damascus on the issue of organized crime syndicates and their relationship to the post 9/11 wars and so-called “Arab Spring.” Even in Damascus, efforts were made to stop the presentation, forcing me to go directly to Syria’s Minister of Justice, Dr. Najm Hamad al Ahmad, using terse tones. Dr. Najm ordered the conference extended at my request.

With regional security officials and media present, US Army Colonel James Hanke (retired) and I addressed the conclave with Dr. Najm at my side. The effect was startling, and there are reasons for this.

No one ever speaks the truth, not in public. There were repercussions from this, a poisoning attempt, an attempt to plant a kilo of heroin in our hotel room in Lebanon, a plot foiled by VT financial editor Mike Harris.

That story hasn’t ended but, worse still, it is no longer told, even in Syria. Let us review that message and see how it applies today.

Syria

Currently, Syria is being looted by US-backed Kurds who have ethnically cleansed and seized not hundreds but thousands of square miles of oil and gas fields, fertile farmlands, and billions of dollars of industrial and commercial resources.

Before that, Syria was looted openly by Turkish organized crime, something I reviewed in detail with the Syrian government; not just endless antiquities sold in London and New York, but entire factories, machine tools, copper pipes from schools – anything that could be uprooted from areas supposedly under the control of ISIS and al Qaeda or the supposed Free Syrian Army – was stolen.

Heavy equipment was brought into Syria, lines of trucks, even teams of engineers, across a carefully guarded border under the watchful eye of Turkish security services fully partnered with organized crime cartels we traced to Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and across Europe and into the United States.

In addition, thousands of oil trucks were brought into the region, mostly from the United States. Used tanker trucks were being bought wholesale across the US and loaded on transports at the Port of Houston, shipped to Turkey and, from there, transited to Iraq and Syria to steal oil.

Previous oil thefts, mostly by the US, had been done using the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, looting Iraq’s Kirkuk oil field, largest in the world, of up to $.5 trillion in oil during and after the US occupation of Iraq, mostly by Exxon and British Petroleum, aided by corrupt US officials. Alex Powers, a VT bureau chief, served as assistant to Paul Bremer, US-appointed “Governor of Iraq” who allegedly oversaw this process.

I met with Iraqi officials, while representing the United Nations, over this issue as well, during this period from my office in Erbil. Everything was known.

The reason we mention this is that there would have been no looting of Syrian oil – something moving into high gear at this writing, with theft of Syrian oil at the highest levels ever – without the precedent set by the US and Britain in Iraq from 2005 onward.

The theft of Syrian oil that began in 2012, hauled mostly by American trucks delivered into Syria and Iraq though Turkey, coincided, of course, with the renewed looting of the Kirkuk oil fields, north and northeast of Baghdad.

Problem is, when this oil was stolen from Iraq, the only road systems that would deliver this to refineries and the world market, an endless stream of thousands of trucks, was through the city of Erbil itself, the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government, then into ISIS-held Mosul; and from there, north past a Turkish-held region inside Iraq and right into Turkey itself.

What am I saying here? ISIS, powerful Turkish organizations and the government of the KRG in Iraq were fully partnered with their massive theft of resources, taking place with the tacit approval of the US and British military.

This of course means the entire “coalition” effort against ISIS was fake — fake then, and fake now. ISIS was funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, openly aided by the Israeli Air Force, and facilitated by many governments: Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey, Jordan, Bahrain and more, many more.

Why? Our hypothesis shows the long partnership between multi-generational organized crime and governments, some controlled, some partnered with, that stage terrorism and organize wars as a backdrop for criminal activities.

Iraq

This isn’t politics, it’s organized crime – a mafia operating inside the Kurdish region, working in concert with the Turkish mafia, which has long partnered with what is called the “Kosher Nostra” – the “oligarchs” who run much of the world’s organized crime from Trump Towers in New York, from the City of London, where they own banks, from Ukraine and across the world.

The government in Baghdad, with US cash flowing into key Sunni politicians, remained divided and helpless. I met with security officials in Baghdad in January 2014 to discuss the threat of ISIS. Several I spoke with assured me ISIS was easy to use and control. Months later, most of those I had spoken with had been beheaded.

No one was prepared for the level of oil theft planned under ISIS.

Until stopped by Russian aerospace forces, the stream of trucks stealing oil from Syria and Iraq was so large it would have been visible using only the naked eye from the surface of the moon, and by small telescope from Mars – yet the endless fleet of American surveillance drones saw nothing. Why?

American lawmakers were receiving their share, paid into their campaign funds though dummy corporations allowed by a highly controversial Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2005), and through accounts in the Cayman Islands under the auspices of a former American presidential candidate.

In 2012, a former FBI agent brought me the files on these payoffs and submitted to a video debriefing outlining billions paid to US officials. That video was erased from YouTube but still exists on Vimeo. It was offered to Mueller investigators during an interview at FBI headquarters. They did not accept for reasons unknown.

The same “ratline” used to launder funds to pay off congress also launders cash from the drug cartels of Mexico and Columbia directly into the US political system and manages a flow of cash from Afghanistan as well.

Afghanistan

When the US took over that nation beginning in late 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld presented evidence that al Qaeda had vast underground cities across Afghanistan, housing tens of thousands of terrorists. He presented his evidence on MSNBC to anchor Tim Russert. The video of this farce is here.

Of course, the dozens of bases never existed, but America’s transition of Afghanistan from a drug free nation to a nation of addicts – a nation that is the world’s largest producer of processed heroin – exists to this day.

In a 2009 interview with a former Seal Team commander and regional director for not “a” but “the” largest American contractor in the region at the time, I was told the US was using Global Hawk long range drones, like the one Iran shot down in July 2019 over the Straits of Hormuz, to move heroin to Europe and the US.  VT editors Colonel James Hanke and Mike Harris were with me during that exchange.

The money trail for this heroin led not only through Mexico and the Cayman Islands to key US officials, but through Switzerland as well; and paid officials in Afghanistan, former officials in Pakistan, key members of Israel’s Likudist party, and funded extremist organizations across Europe.

The United States

The recent Epstein scandal in the US has had some startling repercussions. With the wealth of allegations, yet unproven, supposedly tying large numbers of American officials to a child sex ring run by a foreign intelligence agency, a very real issue of Epstein’s mysterious wealth has revealed useful information.

Tracing his key financial backer, we stumbled upon a longtime partnership with the Gambino crime family of New York, and from there, developed inexorable ties to historical figure Meyer Lansky. A fascinating background piece published by MintpressNews outlines the American roots of the organized crime network that highly informed sources say is manifested in ISIS and some of the right wing movements in Europe as well.

The article cites how Prohibition, a law enacted in the US in 1919, led to a major Canadian smuggling operation bringing liquor into the US.

The massive funding from this linked the Canadian crime family, the Bronfmans, to “Murder Incorporated’s” Meyer Lansky, and allegedly ties them both to FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover and CIA founder Alan Dulles; making both organizations, at some level at least, rooted in the Kosher Nostra, and possibly tying them to the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy, and certainly tying them to Iran Contra and the massive criminal conspiracy that swept the American government under President Reagan.

That trail, from the 1920s, leads to Roy Cohn, former legal council for alleged sex blackmail victim and “red baiter” Senator Joseph McCarthy. By the late 1960s, disgraced Cohn had moved into a powerful New York law firm, aided by former CIA director Alan Dulles.

Note that it was Dulles, who John Kennedy fired as CIA director, who headed the Warren Commission which investigated Kennedy’s murder.

In 1975, the House Select Committee on Assassinations officially discarded the Warren Commission report citing that John Kennedy was killed by “person or persons unknown,” something now censored from American history. From MintPress:

“The Roy Cohn Machine 

Roy Cohn was only at the beginning of his career when he waded his way into the underground sexual blackmail ring apparently led by Lewis Rosenstiel. Indeed, when Cohn first met Hoover, he was only 23 years old. Over the next three decades or so, before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1986 at the age of 56, Cohn built a well-oiled machine, largely through his close friendships with some of the country’s most influential figures.

Among Cohn’s friends were top media personalities like Barbara Walters, former CIA directors, Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy, media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman, numerous celebrities, prominent lawyers like Alan Dershowitz, top figures in the Catholic Church and leading Jewish organizations like B’nai B’rith and the World Jewish Congress. Many of the same names that surrounded Cohn until death in the late 1980s would later come to surround Jeffrey Epstein, with their names later appearing in Epstein’s now-infamous “little black book”. 

While President Trump is clearly connected to both Epstein and Cohn, Cohn’s network also extends to former President Bill Clinton, whose friend and longtime political advisor, Richard “Dirty Dick” Morris, was Cohn’s cousin and close associate. Morris was also close to Clinton’s former communications director, George Stephanopoulos, who is also associated with Jeffrey Epstein.

Yet, these were only Cohn’s connections to respectable members of the establishment. He was also known for his deep connections to the mob and gained prominence largely for his ability to connect key figures in the criminal underworld to respected influential figures acceptable to the public sphere. Ultimately, as New York attorney John Klotz stated, Cohn’s most powerful tool was blackmail, which he used against friend and foe, gangster or public official alike. How much of that blackmail he acquired through his sexual blackmail operation will likely never be known.”

Roy Cohn, of course, was Donald Trump’s mentor, constant companion and legal representative until Cohn’s death.

Conclusion

It is clear that the political processes of the United States, Great Britain and Israel are interlocked under the control of multi-generational organized crime.

It is also clear that security agencies of these nations have chosen to seek funding through illegal arms and narcotics sales and that activities of these agencies have become inconsistent with their appointed tasks.

You see, if seeking “black funding” is allowed, and it is, without limit, then security agencies, even military commands and, as it follows, governments, become criminal organizations.

Their actions, psychological warfare, massive “lie machines,” to cover their activities, endless corruption, complicity in war for profit, false flag terrorism, manipulation of world markets, rigging elections, even rewriting history, must be considered as factual and real. Failure to do so blinds and cripples any government, any organization, any people who attempt to resist.

Then, worse, so much worse, a reexamination of history in this light then questions everything – events, wars, historical figures – is any of it real?

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of  VT, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Gordon Duff

Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.

Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.

Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.

• Gordon’s Archives:  2008-2015
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