US ex-intelligence chief on ISIS rise: It was ‘a willful Washington decision’
… from Russia Today, Moscow
[ Editor’s note: My hat goes off to those who have the budgets and the staff to do the grunt work on getting these FOIA gems revealed. As we have stated many times, our sources were giving us a steady supply of concerns over the “chain of command” involvement or non-involvement in our wide scale use of military terrorist formations as a cheap destabilization, regime change tool.
Reports of firewalls being set up to block the usual auditing required to monitor military spending, even on covert activities, were the first seeds that we got. Even in top secret operations the bean counters are riding herd on funds disappearing or, as it seems in this case, being converted to uses that could not be tracked.
Above board things don’t require such an institutionalized smokescreen being set up to hide accountability. It takes very high up people to change normal auditing procedures like this, so if there were Congressional hearings at some point, there was not a breadcrumb trail to whom the puppet masters are. But the list of suspects is a short one.
So we salute retired General Flynn for coming out of the closet on this. There are many more who know more about how this house of horrors evolved, and when an ex-DIA director speaks out, it provides cover for more to do so. We have to remember to show support for them every way we can… Jim W. Dean ]
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– First published … August 10, 2015 –
The US didn’t interfere with the rise of anti-government jihadist groups in Syria that finally degenerated into Islamic State, claims the former head of America’s Defense Intelligence Agency, backing a secret 2012 memo predicting their rise.
General Flynn dismissed Al Jazeera’s supposition that the US administration “turned a blind eye” to the DIA’s analysis. Flynn believes the US government didn’t listen to his agency on purpose.
“I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision,” the former DIA chief said.
The classified DIA report presented in August 2012, stated that.
“The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al- Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” being supported by “the West, Gulf countries and Turkey.”
The document recently declassified through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), analyses the situation in Syria in the summer of 2012 and predicts:
“If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria… and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”
The report warns of “dire consequences” of this scenario, because it would allow Al-Qaeda to regain its positions in Iraq and unify the jihadist Sunni forces in Iraq, Syria and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against all other Muslim minorities they consider dissenters.
“ISI (the Islamic State of Iraq) could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards of unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory,” the DIA report correctly predicted at the time.
Those groups eventually emerged as Islamic State (IS formerly ISIS/ISIL) and Al-Nusra Front, an Islamic group loyal to Al-Qaeda.
Unlike the US State Department, which rushed to label the declassified DIA memo as unimportant soon after its declassification, the DIA’s former head expressed full trust in the 2012 report, stressing he “paid very close attention” to this document, adding “the intelligence was very clear.”
Al Jazeera notes that Lieutenant General Michael Flynn became “the highest ranking intelligence official to go on record,” saying the US and other states, notably Turkey and the Gulf Arab states, were sponsoring Al-Qaeda-led rebels in Syria with political support and weapons in an attempt to overthrow President Bashar Assad.
When Al Jazeera’s Hasan asked Flynn why he didn’t attempt to stop the US coordinating arms transfers to Islamic extremists, the retired general said:
“I hate to say it’s not my job, but my job was to ensure the accuracy of our intelligence,” said Flynn, who also served as director of intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during the US hunt for Bin Laden.
With the Al-Qaeda’s notorious founder “killed in Pakistan in 2011”, the former DIA head admitting the US sponsored Al-Qaeda-associated groups a year later in Syria should come as a shock to American media outlets, such as the Daily Beast, which criticized the DIA memo as unworthy.
Author for the Levant Report, Brad Hoff says hours after he published a rebuttal to the Daily Beast article, he was contacted by a personal friend, a high level official with CIA Public Affairs, who urged Hoff to drop his comments regarding the IS issue, insisting the Daily Beast article had been “written insightfully.”
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Jim W. Dean was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.
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