05/22/15 – Brad Hoff – The Scott Horton Show

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Next up is Brad Hoff of Levant Report, the real Middle East debunking the soundbites.
Welcome back to the show, Brad.
How are you doing?
Thanks so much for having me back on, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
Your audio now sounds terrible compared to a few minutes ago.
Did something change?
Nothing changed.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, you sound good now.
So we'll go ahead.
2012 Defense Intelligence Agency document.
West will facilitate rise of Islamic State in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
Now, there's much to talk about in this document and in context, but first I want to make sure, Brad, that we don't overstate things or that we try to state things as carefully and accurately as we can here.
You're a former Army guy, so I hope that you can explain to me just exactly what this document is.
It's labeled secret.
But then again, it also says information report, not finely evaluated intelligence.
And there's quite a bit blacked out, well, with big white squares, but much of it is redacted.
And so I wonder if there's any question as to the context of exactly what document are we looking at here.
After all, they gave it not even in a lawsuit, but just a simple FOIA.
They gave it to Larry Klayman at Judicial Watch.
So before we get into all the substance, I wonder if you can give us your best estimation of exactly what it is we're looking at here.
Well, you're right.
That is a question, and currently there's a bit of debate over this document happening online right now.
And that is the question, how suggestive of policy it is versus how merely predictive it is.
I mean, one of the things that the DIA does along with CIA analysts, well, they sit around, and based on their best research, they make predictions.
And so, yes, certainly on one level, this is merely as realist a prediction as possible.
But it is fascinating, the predictions made, because they seem to have all come true, especially in the last year as the Islamic State makes itself known and becomes bigger and bigger.
But that's certainly a question, whether or not this is an active policy document or whether or not it's mere analysis.
I would tend to side on the mere analysis side.
The DIA has been actually pretty consistent when other agencies have not been.
They actually, back when President Bush was making the case to invade Iraq, they actually gave some pretty spot-on intelligence about the infamous aluminum tubes.
And there was a DIA document that said Saddam was merely seeking those tubes to make mortars, conventional weapons.
But apparently that was suppressed by the Bush administration.
And so, no, I would say that much of this document is merely predictive.
But it's as realistic as possible, and it proved spot-on.
All right, now, so we've got plenty of time for the context here, I mean, for the content.
But as far as the context, can you say, is it certain whose voice this is in?
They're not saying, well, this is what a guy told us or something like that.
This is a DIA employee reporting to his boss what he best thinks.
Is that it?
Well, I don't know.
I've actually personally never been an analyst, though I've worked on the peripheries of intelligence circles when I was at Quantico and in the Pentagon briefly.
I do still have a number of friends that are active in the intelligence world, especially CIA.
And yes, documents like this tend to start at lower levels, and then they get kicked up the chain.
But if you look at the first page of this document, it was actually pretty widely circulated.
I'm looking at, I think, what is a reference to the Joint Chiefs, Department of Homeland Security, State Department, CIA.
It was sent to the Navy Yard.
It was sent around to multiple Air Force generals.
So it looked like a widely circulated document.
But at the same time, it notes that it is an information report, not finely evaluated intelligence.
But it was clearly part of the high-level conversation.
And it's certainly accurate enough.
And, boy, I sure would like to see an unredacted piece of this.
When you see what they allowed you to go ahead and read in here, it really makes me wonder.
And some of these redactions are really big.
A whole page, in fact, is missing here.
All right, so it's some kind of DIA report.
It doesn't seem like they're just saying, hey, boss, this is what an informant told us or anything like that.
It does seem to be the opinion of the – or the view or the assessment of the person writing it, as best as I can tell just from reading it.
But I don't have any familiarity, really, with Army documents or exactly how these things work.
But that's the way it seems like.
And then – so now – oh, we've still got time for this segment, thank goodness.
Let's break it down.
I mean, start at the beginning, the first important part you think that we need to take a look at here or go from just order of importance.
What is it that is such a big deal about this thing?
Well, as I was going through the documents on Judicial Watch, and to my knowledge, Judicial Watch, they only published, I think, a selection of the 100 documents that were made available after the court ordered declassification based on multiple denials of their FOIA requests.
But as I was looking through these, I was pretty surprised at the admissions, like you say, but equally surprised – or maybe I shouldn't be surprised – that Fox's initial coverage, for example, just focused on the Benghazi angle.
It seems like few people bothered to really dig into this particular, I want to say, August 12, 2012 document.
And so when I first started reading it, I had the same really shock or surprise as you did, starting from the general situation, the kind of broad summary.
It says, internally, events are taking a clear sectarian direction.
The Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.
But then it follows that up right away with note C, the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition.
Again, opposition was previously defined as Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood.
And this is actually consistent with – In Al-Qaeda, yeah.
Right, exactly.
And it's interesting the way they do that, too, right?
It's just like on TV, where they go, oh, yeah, the rebels in Syria, they're the Bin Ladenites.
And then they turn right around and they go, so what are we going to do about this Assad guy?
And they just, you know, pretend the dissonance in there.
They just skip right over it.
It's the same kind of thing here.
We're like, yes, we support the opposition.
The opposition are our enemies.
Well, it's not the first time.
It's not the first time.
I saw a good article that called the current Syria proxy war Afghanistan 2.0.
I mean, this is how policy is created, you know, the whole idea of my enemy's enemy is my friend.
And, well, we saw the blowback from the so-called Afghan freedom fighters on 9-11.
I fear even worse blowback from our current policies in Syria.
But it not only identifies the opposition.
The document not only identifies the opposition as al-Qaeda.
It actually very matter-of-factly states that the external powers are supporting this al-Qaeda opposition.
Right, and include themselves in it.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Brad Hoff from LevantReport.com.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Brad Hoff, former U.S. Army.
Fortunately, he didn't have to kill anybody in the war or anything.
Then he went to live in Syria for a little while until America and its allies started backing the Mujahideen.
And now, you know, the shock here when we're talking about this document.
Oh, LevantReport.com is where he writes.
LevantReport.com.
The shocking thing here is just that they would write so frankly about what it is that they're up to.
Obviously, they knew as well as all of us did that this was their plan.
It was, you know, Prince Bandar helped arrange this thing from the very beginning in 2011.
The Americans and their NATO allies, especially the French, were in on it from the beginning.
And, you know, they succeeded in getting a lot of people killed.
I guess they thought it would be easy like Libya.
But, you know, I have these two clips, and I like to play them.
And so here I'm going to, again, real quick here.
First of all, oh, I should say this is Hillary Clinton from February or March, early March maybe, in 2012.
When she's on the defensive, why aren't we doing enough to overthrow Assad in Syria?
And she's explaining the Obama regime's lack of action.
This is when, of course, she's still the secretary of state here.
And so her excuse for not doing more is.
.
.
We know al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
And then this is, again, CBS News.
I think I said that.
CBS News.
And then she further elaborates that.
So I think, Wyatt, you know, despite the great pleas that we hear from those people who are being ruthlessly assaulted by Assad, if you're a military planner or if you're a secretary of state and you're trying to figure out do you have the elements of an opposition that is actually viable, we don't see that.
There it is.
That's the ultimate concession right there.
Obama himself said the idea we're going to support an army of moderates to take on all jihadists and the Assad army backed by Iran and Hezbollah and Russia, that was always a fantasy, just like Scott Horton always said since 2011 on.
That's a direct quote, I'm pretty sure.
No, not the last part.
But then, so anyway, so that brings us back to this document here where it's just proof, really, solid proof that at some very high level inside the government they were being very frank about what they were doing there.
The opposition is the enemy.
We're supporting the opposition.
And then, so go ahead and tell us, Brad, what do they predict to be the result of their support for our enemies, especially the al-Nusra Front, which is just al-Qaeda in Syria, sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City?
Exactly right.
Let me just go ahead and read from the document.
It says, 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.
And of course, Salafis, a lot of times it's used interchangeably with the term Wahhabi.
These are the radical militant Sunnis that believe in a literal expression of jihad.
But it says it right there.
And it was hard to report on this document because, of course, in 2012 there was no such thing as the Islamic State as it exists as a proper noun or proper name today.
But the term Islamic State shows up multiple times throughout the article.
It does specifically refer to, I believe, Islamic State in Iraq, and references AQI, al-Qaeda in Iraq, a lot.
And it seems to assume that that nascent Islamic State would be rooted in al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is exactly what happened.
Back in 2012, well, this is before ISIL or ISIS was a household name that everyone knew about.
The incarnation of ISIS or al-Qaeda as it was then was, of course, as you said, al-Nusra.
But ISIS became more of a distinct reality when it broke away from traditional al-Qaeda in, I believe, 2013.
But, of course, at that time they were all working together along with the Free Syrian Army.
As I've written before, the Free Syrian Army itself was but a kind of branding construct, a way to sell the rebels to the West.
If you remember the PLO under Arafat, what you had with Arafat was a visible face.
A visible face, but the PLO was always just a kind of umbrella group.
I'm not trying to say these groups are synonymous at all in their ideology.
I'm just trying to reference the way that it's structured.
So the PLO was never this unified reality.
It was a command structure with Arafat as the face, a kind of umbrella group, as I tend to explain it to people.
And so the FSA itself was never a unified reality in the same way.
FSA was just a kind of command structure that was over many, many, many factions.
And I'm not at all trying to say that the PLO and the FSA are at all the same in their ideology.
The PLO was always more leftist.
But just in terms of structure, FSA was never a unified reality.
And so what that meant was you had commanders such as Colonel Al-Qaeda, who was head of the Supreme Military Council of Aleppo, exercising direct command over al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda in Syria, as well as ISIS.
And this was proven with multiple reports and even video footage from the Battle of Menegh Air Base in the summer of 2013.
So these groups were working together all along.
And, yes, later on they started fighting each other as the opposition splintered.
But they go in and out of union with each other.
Yeah, well, and it was clear.
And it's just kind of my luck that I've just been doing this show so long and interviewing all these great reporters just kind of all along, that whatever the issue is, we were covering it correctly at the time because it was Patrick Coburn who was doing the commenting, that kind of thing.
And the likes of David Anders, I always like to bring up David Anders writing then for McClatchy Newspapers, would say that, hey, the field is dominated by the al-Nusra Front.
And I would ask him, because he was experienced in Iraq War II, and I would ask him, well, in Iraq War II, the jihadists were the smallest part of the Sunni insurgency, allowed to help fight when they got too big for their britches and more harm than they were worth, more trouble than they were worth.
The local Sunni tribesmen turned on them and kicked their ass.
And Petraeus took the credit, but that's not what happened, kind of thing.
And he knew all that because he had covered it in real time.
And so I would ask him to compare that.
And he would say, oh, yeah, no, but in Syria it's different.
In Syria, the war is the al-Nusra Front, basically.
The FSA guys are more or less standing around getting paid.
Yes, exactly.
So as I said, you find the word, the term Islamic State throughout the document.
And, yes, you're right.
At that time it was al-Nusra Front.
Ironically, we now have a very literal Islamic State, which has taken over much of Iraq and half of the geographic territory of Syria.
Well, they say that, too.
They say this thing is sure to blow back into Iraq.
That's the danger.
And they correctly call it a danger, not the plan.
But they basically fully expect it to, even they say, to grab Mosul and Ramadi.
Oh, man.
No, the DIA was right on in this document.
Everyone should read it.
I'm trying to spread it far and wide.
In fact, I called DIA Public Affairs this morning to ask them for some context, and they're supposed to get back to me possibly through an email, but maybe not at all.
I called CIA Public Affairs as well, and I'm trying to get maybe a quote or some information from them.
But in terms of high-level confessions, let me give you one that hasn't seen a lot of circulation.
We talked about Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford last time, and I referenced the Minag Air Base, which was taken from the government by the rebels in summer of 2013.
It's well known that Robert Ford, Ambassador Ford, had a direct relationship with the Free Syrian Army colonel, al-Qaedi, who led that assault.
And there were NPR articles and AP and Reuters reports and things like this, confirming that Ambassador Ford was working with the Supreme Military Council at the time.
The United States was likely paying the salaries of the commanders.
And, of course, last time we talked, we also talked about Ambassador Robert Ford's incredibly candid admissions now, saying, well, really, there never were moderates.
But a lot of people have never seen his interaction with some Middle East journalists on his Twitter account.
His Twitter account is at FordRS58.
And his admissions on his Twitter account were so shocking, I actually tried to get some independent verification that this is indeed Ambassador Robert Ford's Twitter account.
A number of internationally known Syria analysts follow this account.
But I just wanted to make sure, so I contacted Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma.
He's the director of Middle East Studies there.
He also runs the website Syria Comment.
He's widely regarded as an expert on Syria.
He confirmed to me that this is Robert Ford's account.
And on February 23rd of this year, an al-Monitor journalist, who I believe is embedded in Aleppo, he writes under the pseudonym Edward Dark.
He asked Robert Ford on Twitter, Do you deny knowing that most of the moderates you directly backed fought alongside ISIS and al-Nusra on front lines in Aleppo in 2013?
And this is Robert Ford's response.
Absolutely do not deny.
Criticize them in 2013 and 2014 and publicly a month ago.
Major problem for opposition.
And, of course, McClatchy also recorded Ambassador Ford as more recently saying, The days of looking the other way while the context was weapons going to al-Nusra, the days of looking the other way are over.
So there's all kinds of high-level admissions.
And this DIA document really completes the picture, I would say.
Now, you know, Obama, and we're going over time here.
Is that all right?
You got a minute?
Sure.
OK, cool.
So Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg back in 2012, Yeah, you're right, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Getting rid of Assad and replacing him with a solid Democratic opposition.
That being which never mind that part, that would be a great way to take Iran down a peg.
And, you know, oh, and I can't tell you all that we're doing because then I'd have to kill you kind of thing.
Ha ha ha.
He didn't use the then I'd have to kill you.
But he does joke about it's classified.
I can't tell you everything.
But trust me, Jeffrey Goldberg, we're working really hard on it.
And so that lays bare the motive, I guess, as far as the Americans are concerned.
And I guess, you know, the Turks and the the Saudis have their own motives for wanting to, you know, hurt Assad.
But then presumably and I don't know about the Turks, but presumably the Americans, the Israelis and the Saudis have an interest in trying to weaken Iran, even though the Americans stupidly gave them the southern, you know, half of Iraq, basically the southeastern part of Iraq there.
But then it seems like here's the point I'm finally getting to creating the Islamic State and allowing the rise of the Islamic State.
So accurately predicted in this document that we're talking about here seems like maybe it is a good way to hurt Assad and take half of his country away from him.
I'll buy that.
But in Iraq, all they've done is basically provoke the Iranians into having given them an excuse to double or triple or whatever number their support and integration with the Iraqi government, the Baghdad government, which is, after all, still just the Dawa party basically running the thing.
And, you know, whatever differences there were between the Iranians and the Shiite government in Baghdad, this crisis has helped surely to to paper those over.
We've seen the head of the Quds Force leading the militias on the ground.
Of course, they're arming them and training them and paying them the Shiite militias that are fighting.
And so this seems like, if anything, has helped the Iranians solidify their gains from Iraq War two rather than worked in any way to limit them.
I mean, sure, it's it's helped divide Assad from them.
But, hell, if you give them twice the Baghdad they have before, who cares?
Our alliances currently in the Middle East are becoming so contradictory so fast.
I sometimes can barely keep up, as I think is the case with many Americans.
What I do know, knowing knowing a lot of Syrians, knowing Iraqis, none of this helps the common people.
Right.
Which is what the political class always claims.
And so it really sickens me that, well, to reference the title of Brzezinski's famous book, The Grand Chessboard.
It really sickens me that the political class in Washington just sits around and manipulates the region like it's a chessboard.
And, yes, ISIS is a strategic tool, as you said, to put pressure on the Syrian regime, put pressure ultimately on the Iranians, perhaps used to bring them to the table.
I'm not sure if there's evidence that the United States is actively seeking to overthrow the Syrian government.
But clearly, clearly, Washington did want the fragmentation of Syria.
And clearly, Washington did want to use ISIS and these other radical groups to paint the Syrian government in a corner.
And sadly, nobody wins, no matter if a common civilian on the ground identifies with the opposition or the government or somewhere in the middle.
Nobody wins.
And so it's just it's really a sad state of affairs, especially for people who who know people on the ground.
It seems increasingly obvious that those in power, those making the decisions do not actually know people affected by these decisions.
Yeah.
Well, and if they know what they're doing, then God help them.
You know what I mean?
Their their best argument is that they're the stupidest people on the face of the earth who ever held power.
But if they don't have that going for them, then may God have mercy on their souls.
This madness.
I mean, this is we're just getting we're only, you know, whatever.
We're at stage two of this, you know, certain to be a century long sectarian civil war over there in the Middle East that George W.
Bush started.
And Obama has just he made sure.
Right.
He's a guy who dropped the cinder block on the gas pedal and jumped out.
No doubt.
This is a theater war.
This is a theater war.
And, you know, Syria and Iraq, it kind of comes in and out of the media.
But Americans need to realize this is a theater war that has the potential at any moment to blow up in a fully acknowledged world war.
Absolutely.
All right.
So that's Brad Hoff.
He's writing that Levant report dot com.
This one is called 2012 DIA document.
West will facilitate rise of Islamic State in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
Read it.
And we.
Thanks, Brad.
Thank you, Scott.
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