How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby 8bitagent » Wed Mar 18, 2015 6:16 am

justdrew » Tue Mar 17, 2015 12:47 am wrote:Anonymous released 9,200 ISIS supporter Twitter account names to apply pressure on Twitter to suspend them

“How is it that the US government, capable of coordinating a complex air campaign from nearly 6,000 miles away, remains virtually powerless against the Islamic State’s online messaging and distribution network?
(and having spent billions developing the capabilities we know all too well to 'tap' the damn near entire internet)

“If the United States is struggling to counter the Islamic State’s dispersed, rapidly regenerative online presence, why not turn to groups native to this digital habitat? Why not embrace the efforts of third-party hackers like Anonymous to dismantle the Islamic State – and even give them the resources to do so?”


I'm afraid the unanswered question from paragraph one answers paragraph two.




meanwhile... (from the washington times no less. lol)

‘Jihadi John’ still has access to British bank account: ‘Incomprehensible’

amazing init? They be workin SO HARD ta p'tect us huh?


http://www.historycommons.org/news.jsp? ... 393703-423

Some credit cards used by the hijackers were still used in the US after 9/11. For instance, a credit card jointly owned by Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi was used twice on September 15. This helps confirm news reports from late 2001 that hijacker credit cards were used on the East Coast as late as early October 2001. At the time, a government official said that while some of the cards might have been stolen, “We believe there are additional people out there” who helped the hijackers.
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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 23, 2015 3:22 pm

MARCH 23, 2015

A Trail of Blunders and Blood Across the Middle East

How Tony Blair Helped Open the Door for ISIS
by PATRICK COCKBURN
Tony Blair stepping down as a Middle East peace envoy after eight years was greeted almost everywhere with a mixture of harsh criticism, derision and relief. He had reportedly long been allocating three days a month to the job and devoting the rest of his time to his business interests.

Blair is a member of a strange but exclusive club consisting of British and American political leaders whose careers have been blighted or terminated over the past century by calamitous involvement in the Middle East. On the British side members include Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Anthony Eden, and among the Americans are Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush.

Do the different crises in the Middle East with which these six men failed to cope successfully have anything in common? Were similar mistakes made, and why has the region become such a graveyard for political reputations?

Blair’s departure coincided almost to the day with the centenary of the moment on 18 March 1915 when an Anglo-French fleet entered the Dardanelles with the purpose of fighting its way through to Istanbul. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill was a prime advocate of the plan which failed disastrously when Turkish mines and guns sank three battleships and seriously damaged three others. Shortly afterwards he supported the landing of ground troops on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April, which ended in total defeat eight months later, after a quarter of a million British and French troops had been killed or wounded, along with a similar number of Turkish soldiers.

The British attacked the rugged and highly defensible Turkish positions at Gallipoli primarily because a series of Turkish defeats in the first months of the First World War led Churchill and Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, to underestimate their powers of resistance. Reading about this in Eugene Rogan’s highly informed and intelligent book, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East 1914-20, I was struck by the parallels between what happened then and the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003. In both cases there was the same over-confident underestimation of the opposition, and wilful ignorance of the dangerous physical terrain at patrickisis2Gallipoli and the equally lethal political landscape of Iraq. In the wake of this failure Churchill was demoted, and his reputation never quite recovered until he became Prime Minister in 1940.

Seven years after Gallipoli, in 1922, Lloyd George lost his job as prime minister when he almost went to war with Turkey after backing the failed Greek invasion of the Turkish mainland. I have always thought that Blair resembled Lloyd George more than any other British prime minister in his ambition, self-belief and ability to manipulate others. Both men imagined with good reason that they could successfully manoeuvre their way towards ingenious solutions for intractable problems. They had their greatest triumphs in Ireland: Lloyd George negotiating an end to the Irish War of Independence in 1921 and Blair bringing peace to Northern Ireland with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Crucial to their success was that they both knew a great deal about Ireland. Lloyd George because Ireland had been at the centre of successive British political crises for half a century. Blair because he is half-Irish, his mother Hazel coming from a family of Protestant farmers in Donegal. Blair’s autobiography, a fascinating and funny book, has a telling story about his grandmother and her undiluted Protestant bigotry. Blair went to see her when she was so far gone with Alzheimer’s that she scarcely recognised him. Blair writes: “As I patted her hand, she suddenly grabbed mine, opened her eyes wide and said: ‘Whatever else you do, son, never marry a Catholic.’ Everything else had disappeared from her mind, but left at the bottom was the residue of sectarian aversion.”

Despite taking Britain into the Iraq war of 2003 and living in the Middle East for long periods since he was prime minister, Blair has never shown anything like the same sensitivity to the politics of the region as he once had in Ireland.

Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry in 2010, Blair gave the impression of never taking on board the sectarianism and corruption of the government in Baghdad – that he had helped place in power. The rise of Islamic State to rule a third of Iraq must have come as a complete surprise, going by his up-beat view of Iraq at that time. It would be intriguing to know what advice Blair gives his wealthy clients in the Gulf and central Asia about future developments in Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Is anything to be learned from the Suez crisis of 1956 which ended the career of Anthony Eden and proved that Britain could not act in the Middle East contrary to American wishes? The demonisation of President Nasser as Hitler reborn was very similar to the demonisation of Saddam Hussein (though he was much more of a demon than Nasser ever was). In both cases self-deluding propaganda held that a single ruler of immeasurable evil was responsible for the troubles of Egypt and Iraq. I remember a neurosurgeon in a hospital in Baghdad saying to me just after the fall of the city in 2003 that “the Americans should remember that even Saddam found it difficult to rule Iraqis”.

After the Suez crisis, the United States became the leading Western power in the Middle East and its presidents became more likely than British prime ministers to end up on the political casualty list. Jimmy Carter had bad luck with the outbreak of the Iranian revolution, the fall of the Shah and the seizure of hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran. There was not a lot he could do about it. Ronald Reagan was permanently damaged by Iran-Contra, the bizarre attempt to persuade the Iranians to free US hostages taken in Beirut in return for arms and use the money from the arms sales to illegally fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. It should always have been obvious that the damage from this weird plot going wrong far outweighed any possible benefits. It is also probably a mistake to try to outdo the Iranians when it comes to deviousness.

The invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain in 2003 was in some respects a re-run of the Suez crisis, except that this time it was the US that had outrun the limits of its power. Bush and Blair might have got away with invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein, whom most Iraqis wanted rid of, but their occupation of the country was never going to be accepted. Bush and Blair never seemed to have understood the hostile reaction of Iraq’s neighbours to the permanent presence of a Western occupation army. Yet Blair complains to this day that Iranian intervention destabilises Iraq, as if it was likely that Iran would ever again accept its Iraqi neighbour being ruled by an enemy. Bush and Blair destroyed the Iraqi state and nobody has succeeded in putting it together again. The doors began to open for Islamic State.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby Luther Blissett » Mon Mar 23, 2015 4:29 pm

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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby justdrew » Mon Mar 23, 2015 10:38 pm



Also, note the recent snowden revelations about them engaging in "cyber" attacks of a False Flag nature. Maybe Canada did Sony.
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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby Nordic » Wed Mar 25, 2015 3:40 am

Pentagon "loses" 500 million dollars in weaponry somewhere, supposedly in Yemen.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat ... story.html


Pentagon loses track of $500 million in weapons, equipment given to Yemen


The Pentagon is unable to account for more than $500 million in U.S. military aid given to Yemen, amid fears that the weaponry, aircraft and equipment is at risk of being seized by Iranian-backed rebels or al-Qaeda, according to U.S. officials.

With Yemen in turmoil and its government splintering, the Defense Department has lost its ability to monitor the whereabouts of small arms, ammunition, night-vision goggles, patrol boats, vehicles and other supplies donated by the United States. The situation has grown worse since the United States closed its embassy in Sanaa, the capital, last month and withdrew many of its military advisers.

In recent weeks, members of Congress have held closed-door meetings with U.S. military officials to press for an accounting of the arms and equipment. Pentagon officials have said that they have little information to go on and that there is little they can do at this point to prevent the weapons and gear from falling into the wrong hands.





More at link
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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby Luther Blissett » Thu Mar 26, 2015 2:52 pm

Feds: National Guardsman plotted attack for ISIS

A National Guardsman arrested for supporting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, had allegedly planned an attack on a military post in Illinois, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Army National Guard Spc. Hasan Edmonds, 22, was arrested at Chicago Midway International Airport Wednesday night while he was attempting to fly to Cairo to allegedly join ISIS, the department said in a statement.

Members of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in Chicago also arrested Edmonds' cousin, Jonas Edmonds, 29, a member of the Illinois Army National Guard, at his home in Aurora, Illinois.

Both men are U.S. citizens.

The cousins allegedly told an FBI undercover employee their plan for an armed attack on the U.S. military facility in northern Illinois where Hasan Edmonds had been training.

According to court documents, an undercover FBI agent sent Edmonds a friend request on Facebook in late 2014, and in January, Edmonds and the agent exchanged a series of messages on Facebook, and Hasan allegedly discussed plans to travel overseas with his cousin to fight with ISIS extremists, CBS Chicago reported.

"The State has been established and it is our duty to heed the call," he allegedly wrote. "I look forward to the training. I am already in the american kafir [infidel] army ...and now I wish only to serve in the army of Allah alongside my true brothers."

In another message, he allegedly wrote, either he and his cousin would make it overseas, "or bring the flames of war to the heart od [sic] this land with Allah's permission."

Jonas Edmonds allegedly told the undercover employee that they would use uniforms and information from Hasan Edmonds to access the facility and target officers.

The attack was allegedly planned to be carried out after Edmonds departed for Cairo. The Justice Department didn't provide a specific timeframe for how long after Edmonds' departure the attack would take place.

"Throughout the course of this investigation, the defendants were closely and carefully monitored to ensure the safety of the public and our service men and women." FBI Special Agent Robert Holley said in the statement.

After layovers in Detroit and Amsterdam, Edmonds had planned to arrive in Cairo Thursday and allegedly go on to fight on behalf of ISIS using his military training.

Last week, a U.S. Air Force veteran, Tairod Nathan Webster Pugh, was indicted on terrorism charges after allegedly plotting to travel to Syria to join ISIS.
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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby conniption » Sun Apr 05, 2015 4:59 pm

offguardian

Published on March 31, 2015

Questions you aren’t supposed to ask about ISIS: #1 – those Toyota trucks

BlackCatte

Image

ISIS. Murky, masked, terrifying Bad Guys. Islamic hardliners, doing unspeakably ghastly things in faraway sandy places. A horde poised to be unleashed on the innocent everywhere. They merge in the Jungian western mind with race memories of the Saracen, that other convenient boogey man from a previous and ultimately ill-fated bid to make strategic conquest into a moral Crusade. Fear is the message. And it works.

As with most official narratives, the ISIS trope is left largely unexamined by mainstream media, while at the same time being used as a major motivation for continued and increasing war in the Middle East. Given the growing chaos in the region, now spreading to Yemen, and the increasingly blurry role ISIS would appear to be playing, as media fear-porn, war-provocateur and enemy of western enemies, we’ve decided to do a short series asking some of the largely un-addressed questions about these people, and who may be offering them direct or indirect support.

How did ISIS acquire those matching Toyota trucks?

The official story is ISIS stole them from the “Good Terrorists”, (Al Nusra), who were originally given their cool wheels by the US government. Which would seem to beg a couple of enquiries. Not least of which is – why are the US giving any terrorists matching fleets of luxury SUVs? And for that matter, how many fleets are we talking about?

The bronze one?

Image

The white-ish one without logos?

Image

The white one with logos?

Image

Or the silver and black one?

Image

We note ISIS seems reluctant to mix and match its various models. Though occasionally a rogue makes it through…

Image
Image

So, exactly how many trucks did the US supply? Where are ISIS currently garaging this impressive collection? And why do they all have to be Toyotas? Is it a terrorist thing, or simply a US Govt preference? Do Toyota mind the brand-association? Or the fact that so many of the ISIS drive-by photo-ops look like perverted car ads?

Which brings us to a truck-related question:

Who takes the photos?

Specifically – who takes those PR style pics of the matching fleets sailing by, replete with gun-toting, flag-waving terrorists leaning out of every window? Are they just being caught in transit by various opportunist photographers? Or are they pre-planned drive-buys for the purpose of publicity?

If the former, then do ISIS travel everywhere like that – with guys leaning out the windows holding massive ISIS flags? Wouldn’t that slow them down and also make them really easy to identify and take out?

If the latter – who is handling their publicity?

Did they make this video?

Is it by any chance the same people who keep giving them free cars?

next time – how does ISIS (allegedly) smuggle one MILLION dollars worth of oil into Turkey every day?
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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby justdrew » Sun Apr 05, 2015 7:30 pm

well, it looks to me like ISIS does have access to crude spray paint technology. Still, that's a lot of newish vehicles.
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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby Harvey » Sun Apr 05, 2015 9:11 pm

As Clay Davis might say "Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!"
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby conniption » Wed Oct 14, 2015 7:21 am

truthdig

Why the U.S. Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster


Posted on Oct 8, 2015

By Gareth Porter


Image
An Islamic State militant waves his group’s flag as he and another celebrate in Fallujah, Iraq. (AP)

Pundits and politicians are already looking for a convenient explanation for the twin Middle East disasters of the rise of Islamic State and the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria. The genuine answer is politically unpalatable, because the primary cause of both calamities is U.S. war and covert operations in the Middle East, followed by the abdication of U.S. power and responsibility for Syria policy to Saudi Arabia and other Sunni allies.

The emergence of a new state always involves a complex of factors. But over the past three decades, U.S. covert operations and war have entered repeatedly and powerfully into the chain of causality leading to Islamic State’s present position.

The causal chain begins with the role of the U.S. in creating a mujahedeen force to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden was a key facilitator in training that force in Afghanistan. Without that reckless U.S. policy, the blowback of the later creation of al-Qaida would very likely not have occurred. But it was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that made al-Qaida a significant political-military force for the first time. The war drew Islamists to Iraq from all over the Middle East, and their war of terrorism against Iraqi Shiites was a precursor to the sectarian wars to follow.

The actual creation of Islamic State is also directly linked to the Iraq War. The former U.S. commander at Camp Bucca in Iraq has acknowledged that the detention of 24,000 prisoners, including hard-core al-Qaida cadres, Baathist officers and innocent civilians, created a “pressure cooker for extremism.” It was during their confinement in that camp during the U.S. troop surge in Iraq 2007 and 2008 that nine senior al-Qaida military cadres planned the details of how they would create Islamic State.

The Obama administration completed the causal chain by giving the green light to a major war in Syria waged by well-armed and well-trained foreign jihadists. Although the Assad regime undoubtedly responded to the firebombing of the Baath Party headquarters in Daraa in mid-March 2011 with excessive force, an armed struggle against the regime began almost immediately. In late March or early April, a well-planned ambush of Syrian troops killed at least two dozen soldiers near the same city. Other killings of troops took place in April in other cities, including Daraa, where 19 soldiers were gunned down.

During the second half of 2011 and through 2012, thousands of foreign jihadists streamed into Syria. As early as November 2011, al-Qaida was playing a central role in the war, carrying out spectacular suicide bombings in Damascus and Aleppo. Obama should have reacted to the first indications of that development and insisted that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar keep external arms and military personnel and funding out of Syria in order to allow a process of peaceful change to take place. Instead, however, the administration became an integral part of a proxy war for regime change.

Seymour Hersh reported last year that an unpublished addendum to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi revealed a covert CIA operation to arm Syrian rebels, in cooperation with Sunni allies’ intelligence services. In early 2012, Hersh reported, following an agreement with Turkey, then-CIA Director David Petraeus approved an elaborate covert operation in which Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar would fund the shipment of weapons to Syrian rebels from stocks captured from the Gadhafi government. The scheme employed front companies set up in Libya to manage the shipments of arms in order to separate the U.S. government from the operation. An October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report released by the Department of Defense to Judicial Watch confirmed the shipments of Libyan weapons from the port of Benghazi to two Syrian ports near Turkey beginning in October 2011 and continuing through August 2012.

A larger covert program involved a joint military operations center in Istanbul, where CIA officers worked with Turkish, Saudi and Qatari intelligence agencies that were also providing arms to their favorite Syrian rebels groups, according to sources who talked with The Washington Post’s David Ignatius.

By November 2012, al-Qaida’s Syrian franchise, al-Nusra Front, had 6,000 to 10,000 troops—mostly foreign fighters—under its command and was regarded as the most disciplined and effective fighting force in the field. The CIA’s Gulf allies armed brigades that had allied themselves with al-Nusra—or were ready to do so. A Qatari intelligence officer is said to have declared, “I will send weapons to al-Qaeda if it will help” topple Assad.

(Page 2)

The CIA officials overseeing the covert operation knew very well what their Sunni allies were doing. After the U.S. shipments from Benghazi stopped in September 2012 because of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post there, a CIA analysis reminded President Obama that the covert operation in Afghanistan had ended up creating a Frankenstein monster. Even the now-famous account in Hillary Clinton’s 2014 memoirs about Obama rejecting a proposal in late 2012 from CIA Director Petraeus for arming and training Syrian rebels does not hide the fact that everyone was well aware of the danger that arms sent to “moderates” would end up in the hands of terrorists.

Despite this, after rejecting Petraeus’ plan in 2012, Obama approved the covert training of “moderate” Syrian rebels in April 2013. As the Pentagon has been forced to acknowledge in recent weeks, that program has been a complete fiasco, as the units either joined al-Nusra or were attacked by al-Nusra. Meanwhile, as Vice President Joe Biden pointed out in October 2014, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were pouring “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons” into Syria that were ending up in the hands of the jihadists.

Unfortunately, Biden’s complaint came two and a half years too late. By October 2014, more than 15,000 foreign fighters, including 2,000 Westerners, were estimated to have gone to Syria. Islamic State and al-Nusra Front emerged as the two major contenders for power in Syria once Assad is overthrown, and the Saudis and Qataris were now ready to place their bets on al-Nusra. In early 2015, after King Salman inherited the Saudi throne, the three Sunni states began focusing their support on al-Nusra and its military allies, encouraging them to form a new military command, the “Army of Conquest.” The al-Nusra-led front then captured Idlib province in March.

Obama, focusing on the Iran nuclear agreement, has given no indication that he is troubled by his allies’ approach. If the Bush administration destabilized Iraq in order to increase U.S. military presence and power in the Middle East, the Obama administration has countenanced a proxy war that has destabilized and Syria because of his primary concern with consolidating the U.S. alliances with the Saudis and the other Sunni regimes.

Although it has been almost a rigid rule that pundits must ascribe U.S. fealty to its Saudi alliance to oil interests, oil is far from the top of the list of U.S interests today. More important to our national security state is the interest of the Pentagon and the military services to protect the military bases they have in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE. Their need to preserve those alliance relationships is intensified by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) cornucopia of military contracts for U.S. arms manufacturers that assures enormous profits will continue to flow for the foreseeable future. One estimate of the total at stake for the Pentagon and its private allies in military relationships with the GCC is $100 billion to $150 billion over two decades.

Those are crucial bureaucratic and business stakes for the U.S. national security state, which is usually driven by the bottom lines associated with different courses of action. Especially given the administration’s lack of a coherent geopolitical perspective on the region, the security state’s interests offer a persuasive explanation for Obama’s effectively farming out the most important element of its Syria policy to regional allies, with disastrous results.
_______

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby AlicetheKurious » Fri Nov 06, 2015 3:57 pm

Very creepy. This article was prominently displayed on my Yahoo! News homepage. The headline aside, the article reads like an infomercial for "ISIS", filled with testimonials and breathless exaggerations about how big and powerful "ISIS" is, and how far its reach. All the evidence is now in the hands of the international team of expert investigators, and no information at all has been released yet.

There's no substance, just lots of very manipulative hot air. The tone is excited, almost gleeful. It's advertising copy, not journalism. Except for the overt threat at the end.

'ISIS already won this round': The Islamic State just staged a propaganda coup
Business Insider By Natasha Bertrand
23 hours ago


US and European intelligence sources said Wednesday that there is a strong possibility that an ISIS affiliate based in Sinai placed a bomb on a Russian plane bound for St. Petersburg.

The new evidence (??????) linking ISIS to the crash, which killed all 224 people onboard, has the international community buzzing over ISIS's sudden transformation into a major global threat.

And even as the investigation into the crash continues — the White House said Thursday that it could not rule out the possibility of "terrorist involvement" — ISIS has already accomplished a significant feat, regardless of what the fuller picture of evidence eventually presents as their overall role in the attack.

"ISIS in a sense has already won the public back-and-forth because enough people suspect that ISIS may have done it, and for a group like ISIS the objective reality doesn't matter — it is a propaganda war," Shadi Hamid, a researcher at the Brookings Institution who studies Islamist movements, told The New York Times Thursday.

"Objective truth of whether ISIS downed the Russian plane simply doesn't matter as much now," Hamid tweeted, after calling the group's claims of responsibility for the crash a "propaganda coup" in a previous tweet. "ISIS already won this round."

A briefing by The Soufan Group echoed this sentiment: "Whether or not it was a bomb, and whether or not the Islamic State was responsible, the narrative is now set: the Sinai Province of the Islamic State ... will now forever be regarded as having pulled off the largest mass casualty terrorist attack outside a conflict zone since 9/11."

(There's no such thing as "the Sinai Province of the Islamic State" -- Alice).

That the MetroJet attack and the threat it poses to passenger transportation worldwide is being compared to the effect of the September 11, 2001, attacks on US soil displays how the incident has helped ISIS achieve a level of notoriety once enjoyed by al-Qaeda.

Taking responsibility for downing a civilian aircraft places ISIS in the ranks of al-Qaeda, which viewed global jihad as more of a long game and preferred to undermine the West and its partners with large-scale, dramatic attacks.

The possibility that ISIS — which has long relied on territorial conquest and summary executions to consolidate power across the Middle East — has changed its approach to waging jihad would constitute significant momentum for the group.

"The Sinai attack would be a first, and would signal that the Islamic State has become both capable of — and interested in — joining the dreadful ranks of global terrorism," The Soufan Group noted.

But as geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer pointed out to Business Insider, ISIS's strategy hasn't necessarily changed. It is still, at its core, a terrorist organization that wants to be taken seriously and lure recruits to its ranks.

"ISIS is trying to project power against their enemies, big and small," Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, told Business Insider in an email. "They're showing off their capabilities. If their top interest is gaining notoriety to attract recruits and financial support, the strategy is consistent."

(A strategy that is perfectly served by pseudo-articles just like this -- Alice).

It is consistent with ISIS's strategy, too, in that it keeps the target local rather than global.

"The Russians are a target because of their armed intervention in the Syrian civil war from a month ago, not because of their actions outside this theatre," Jason Burke wrote in The Guardian Thursday. "The prime suspects behind the tragedy, if it does prove to be a terrorist attack, are local ISIS supporters in the Sinai. ... The location of the strike is within the core zone of territory of most interest to ISIS."

ISIS's mastery of social media and online propaganda has already given it the ability to recruit tens of thousands of young jihadists in a way that al-Qaeda never could — with its written statements and bland, made-for-TV proselytizing.

It was this success in shaping its media message that made larger-scale attacks unnecessary. ISIS already achieved widespread publicity without having to target other elements, like civilian aviation.

But this opportunity of a propaganda "coup" — with a major foreign power currently bombing ISIS positions in Syria — may have been too good for the group to pass up.

"Putin is not interested in war with ISIS," Bremmer tweeted Wednesday. "But war with ISIS is interested in him." Link


Wow. Could it be more obvious who is behind "ISIS"?
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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby General Patton » Fri Nov 06, 2015 5:59 pm

AlicetheKurious » Fri Nov 06, 2015 2:57 pm wrote:Very creepy. This article was prominently displayed on my Yahoo! News homepage. The headline aside, the article reads like an infomercial for "ISIS", filled with testimonials and breathless exaggerations about how big and powerful "ISIS" is, and how far its reach. All the evidence is now in the hands of the international team of expert investigators, and no information at all has been released yet.

There's no substance, just lots of very manipulative hot air. The tone is excited, almost gleeful. It's advertising copy, not journalism. Except for the overt threat at the end.


Look at her background.

Before joining Business Insider, Natasha worked at a political think tank in Madrid, Spain, researching EU relations with the Middle East and North Africa. Later, she served as the CSR intern at the oil and gas industry association for environmental and social issues in London, focusing on human rights and sustainable development.

She is an alumna of the London School of Economics and a graduate of Vassar College, where she worked as an op-ed columnist for the Miscellany News, writing about politics and international affairs.



https://www.linkedin.com/in/natashabertrand
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July 2012 – October 2012 (4 months)Madrid Area, Spain

•Research: Wrote research papers on relevant foreign policy issues such as the crisis in the Sahel region and the Arab Spring, how these issues would affect the European Union, and how the E.U. should respond.

•Fundraising/Publicity: regular interaction with organizations and news outlets such as the European parliament, El País and La Vanguardia. Supported planning and execution of press trips, events, and various promotions.

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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby AlicetheKurious » Sat Nov 07, 2015 4:22 am

The spectacular advances in Syria by the Syrian Army, Hezbullah and Russia quickly exposed not only the weakness and frailty of "ISIS", but also the hypocrisy and complicity of the US and its "coalition" in promoting it, while claiming to fight it.

Egypt's success in reestablishing control over all but a tiny sliver of Sinai, along the border with Israel, stripped bare the bombastic exaggerations of the so-called "Beit El-Maqdis"/"ISIS", almost all of whom have been killed, captured or forced to flee.

On the ground, without a constant flow of logistical, financial and military support from the West, these groups are easily defeated.

So the battle has shifted to the ether of public perception management, in which the Western powers dominate.

To counter ISIS' massive and humiliating defeats on the battlefield, the Western media is whipping up a bogus victory for it in the media.
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby AlicetheKurious » Sat Nov 07, 2015 1:24 pm

Je Suis Scumbag: Charlie Hebdo Mocks Victims of Russian Plane Crash
…because what's funnier than 220 people falling from the sky? Hardy har har.

Rudy Panko


Democracy's favorite illustrated periodical “Charlie Hebdo” is famous for drawing stupid comics that make people angry. So of course this brave band of French people had to mock the 220 victims of the recent Russian plane crash in Egypt. According to Russia's REN TV:

“The first caricature shows flying bodies and the aircraft wreckage falling on a terrorist. The text under the caricature says: “Russian aviation intensifies its bombings,” the TV channel reported.

Image

Image

Ha-ha. Get it?


The End. Link
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
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Re: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

Postby PufPuf93 » Sat Nov 07, 2015 2:44 pm

AlicetheKurious » Sat Nov 07, 2015 10:24 am wrote:
Je Suis Scumbag: Charlie Hebdo Mocks Victims of Russian Plane Crash
…because what's funnier than 220 people falling from the sky? Hardy har har.

Rudy Panko


Democracy's favorite illustrated periodical “Charlie Hebdo” is famous for drawing stupid comics that make people angry. So of course this brave band of French people had to mock the 220 victims of the recent Russian plane crash in Egypt. According to Russia's REN TV:

“The first caricature shows flying bodies and the aircraft wreckage falling on a terrorist. The text under the caricature says: “Russian aviation intensifies its bombings,” the TV channel reported.

Image

Image

Ha-ha. Get it?


The End. Link


I am all for satire but find this cartoon in very poor taste and anyone that laughs at it sort of icky.

I had never heard of Charlie Hebdo until the Muhammad cartoon events.

Charlie Hebdo is self-styed as "leftist" and "anti-racist" but I do perceive Charlie Hebdo as either "leftist" or "antiracist". :mad2
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