05/29/15 – Asa Winstanley – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Asa Winstanley, an investigative journalist who writes for the Electronic Intifada.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Good to be here.
Good, good.
Happy to have you.
So you've been writing about this subject for a very long time.
It's a very important one.
I believe the latest is, why is the media ignoring Israel's alliance with al-Qaeda?
And I guess we'll get back to the media part, but Israel's alliance with al-Qaeda, whatever do you mean?
Just the facts, as many of them as you can marshal, please.
Yeah, well, that's a very good question.
It's a pretty shocking claim on the surface because al-Qaeda as a movement, as leaders, have had a history of anti-Israel rhetoric.
But historically, al-Qaeda has not really ever attacked Israeli targets.
It's focused on, on one hand, American civilian targets and American military targets.
And of course, you know, attacks in European countries as well against civilians.
And on the other hand, on sectarian attacks against Muslims in Arab countries.
But it hasn't really attacked Israel.
But what I'm referring to specifically is a tactical alliance between Israel at the moment in Syria and al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, the Nusra Front.
And so what do you got on them?
Well, what's happening is that there's been, over the last few years, there's been an ongoing debate in Israeli elite circles of which side in the Syrian civil war they really want to win.
There's been some discussion of, well, maybe the Bashar al-Assad regime wouldn't be so bad as long as they can keep the border quiet.
But what seems, in my judgment, what's come out now on top is the strategy of, in the words of a former Israeli diplomat in the US, he turned the strategy, paraphrasing what he said, but he said, we want to let both sides bleed hemorrhage to death.
So it's a strategy of prolonging the civil war because they want to do that because longer Arabs are fighting each other, they won't be fighting Israel.
So what they're doing at the moment is providing logistical and possibly military support to the Nusra Front, which is al-Qaeda's official Syrian franchise, in the Golan Heights, in the occupied Golan Heights, which is in southwestern Syria.
Okay, now, how can you be so sure?
Okay, well, what we know is that it was widely reported last year in August that the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda in Syria, took over Quneitra, which is a key crossing point in the Golan Heights.
Now, the Golan Heights is part of Syria.
Syria, it was occupied.
Part of it is occupied by Israel and has been occupied since 1967.
But it's really part of Syria.
So that's classified as an illegally occupied territory.
But in practice, on the ground, Israel has occupied it since 1967.
There's a separate sector of the Golan Heights, which the Syrian government managed to retain control of.
Now, of course, with the civil war ongoing in August last year, the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda in Syria, managed to take over a key checkpoint in the town of Quneitra in the Golan Heights.
And that directly borders on to Israeli-controlled.
So the border, well, it's not really a border crossing.
It's actually a ceasefire line, technically.
But the Israelis refer to it as a border crossing.
But it's not a border.
It's just actually from one part of Syria to another.
But in practice, there's a key checkpoint between the Syrian side and the Israeli side in which the Israelis are in direct contact with Syrian rebels.
Now, since August of last year, those rebels are overwhelmingly al-Qaeda.
And the UN reports that there's a UN peacekeeping force in the region, and there has been for many decades.
It's called UNDOF.
And their reports have observed and confirmed contacts between the rebel forces and the al-Qaeda forces and between Israeli military.
Now, the UN doesn't explicitly say they were al-Qaeda because, you know, I suppose they're not going to be going up to them and say, hey, you know, do you have an al-Qaeda membership card or anything like that.
But that's been confirmed that they and since we know that, so it was confirmed there are rebels.
But and since we know that the vast majority of those rebels have been al-Qaeda in that area since August last year, the UN reports have confirmed that those contacts have been ongoing.
So that's the initial starting point of this.
OK, but that's not quite enough.
But there's been several confirmations of this and within mainstream media, but it's underreported.
So like I've listed several of these things were in my articles.
And one of them came in March when an Israeli military official told the Wall Street Journal that they confirmed these reports.
So what I mean by an alliance is providing logistical support.
So what that's taking, what we know for sure that is happening is that the Israelis are treating Syrian rebel fighters and in their hospitals, they set up a field hospital on what they consider the border, on the ceasefire line.
And they're set there.
OK, now, so they're treating the those fighters in the hospital.
That doesn't necessarily prove anything, right?
Because, you know, they have this propaganda line about how they they're just playing a humanitarian role and so on and so forth.
OK, but the key difference is they're treating these rebel fighters who are overwhelmingly al-Qaeda.
And they once once they finish treating them in the field hospital, they allow them to go back to Syria to fight again against the government.
Now, if they were Palestinian resistance fighters from Hamas, for example, or they were Lebanese resistance fighters from Hezbollah who had been treated in Israeli hospitals, there is no way in hell they would send them back to Gaza or to Lebanon or to Syria to fight again, because those forces are adamantly opposed to Israeli occupation forces.
Now, why is why are al-Qaeda fighters not adamantly opposed to to Israeli occupation forces, despite, you know, years of anti-Israel rhetoric from Osama bin Laden?
There's a lot of unanswered questions here.
And it's just it's an it does actually make me angry because it's an absolute scandal how the mainstream media is just ignoring this.
Yeah, well, you know, I've been joking for more than a year now about how really if it wasn't for Israel's fifth column in the United States right now splitting the policy in such absurd directions, we would have a full scale war against the Islamic State right now.
But since that would be, in effect, fighting for Iran and Assad and over Israel's dead body.
So instead, the policy just kind of flounders around.
And in fact, it's to the good, really, because it could be a lot worse right now, couldn't it?
You know what I mean?
If the if the lines were clear and our government, the U.S. government was just picking one side or the other to intervene on, they would be intervening much more severely, I think.
And now I'm sorry we got to take this break, but we'll be back in just a few minutes.
We're talking with Asa Wynn-Stanley wrote a bunch of very important pieces here at Middle East Monitor dot com.
And they're about Israel and the Al-Nusra Front.
We'll be right back.
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Anyway, here is Michael Oren.
I'm sorry to play an entire minute long clip, but I think it's worthwhile here.
I'm talking with Asa Winstanley from the Electronic Intifada here.
We have to choose the lesser of evils here.
The lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shiites.
It's an evil.
Believe me, it's a terrible evil.
Again, they've just taken out 700, 800 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field.
But who are they fighting against?
They're fighting against the proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria.
You can just do the math.
And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers and rockets.
The other side has access to military nuclear capabilities.
So from Israel's perspective, you know, if someone's got if there's got to be an evil that's going to prevail, you know, let let the Sunni evil prevail.
All right.
So, yeah, even worse there than let it be a no win grind forever.
Go ahead and let Al Qaeda win.
Let the Islamic State win.
I mean, he makes it clear who he's talking about.
He's not referring to the mythical moderates here.
He's talking about the ISIS who had just massacred a bunch of Shia airmen in Iraq was, you know, the massacre he is referring to there.
And then, of course, his excuse is the pretended military capability of Iran's nuclear program, which only exists in comic books and in, I guess, the highest councils of Israeli national security affairs.
That's the excuse for it.
And so that's that's Michael Oren, the last ambassador to the United States, under the United States under Benjamin Netanyahu.
And he's explaining it in a very hoity toity, comfortable kind of conference setting.
He's talking to Jeffrey Goldberg.
And it's a very kind of in group sort of thing.
It's just that YouTube was there, too.
And so that that admission just came right out.
But now.
So I understand that.
I'm not saying I agree with it.
I think it's insane, actually.
But I understand Likud says, hey, Iran and therefore Syria and Hezbollah, they are our concern and we don't care who knocked down the towers or any of that.
We have our own priorities and that kind of thing.
But going so far as to actually help the Al-Nusra Front and seemingly only in a marginal kind of a way that's not really going to make or break the difference for him or anything, but it's just enough to make the Israelis guilty of supporting America's worst enemies.
Not that the Americans haven't been supporting them, too.
But still, it seems like a risky PR move for the Israelis.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, absolutely.
And you're exactly right.
They're not out to secure an outright victory for Al-Qaeda by any means.
It's just enough to sort of keep things ticking over, you know, and we have to understand this Israeli support within the context of wider Western support for these so-called rebels, because, you know, all these regional forces that are allied with American and European imperial powers, like the Saudis, most of all, are now supporting Al-Qaeda.
And that was a really interesting clip from Michael Oren.
I'd not heard that.
But yeah, I mean, it sort of confirms the same sort of thinking, again.
And yeah, the thing you say about PR is interesting, because they feel confident enough that they're allowed to do it, to let it slip, you know.
So, like I mentioned in March, an Israeli military official talked to the Wall Street Journal, and he said about these rebels, so-called rebels, who are coming and being treated in this Israeli field hospital.
He said, we don't ask who they are.
We don't do any screening.
Once the treatment is done, we take them back to the border, and they go on their way in Syria.
So they feel confident enough to let that go through.
But they've also taken certain moves to cover it up to a certain extent.
When it was getting a certain amount of attention, there was a Syrian activist, a pro-government, pro-Syrian government activist in the Golan Heights, in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and his name is Sedgil Maket, who was arrested earlier this year and put in detention in a case that the Israeli press was initially banned from reporting.
And he had, I mean, he's like a known activist, but he just sort of gone out with his, you know, with his mobile phone camera.
And he started, you know, because, you know, the Syrian Arabs who still live in the Golan Heights, they see all this going on, you know, they're mostly from the Druze religious minority, and they go out and they see all these Israeli soldiers, and they know exactly what's going on, because it's obvious, you know, they can see there must be some sort of coordination between these Nusra Front al-Qaeda rebels and the Israeli army.
They can see it happening.
And so he went out and he started, you know, filming and trying to document some of this.
And he reportedly got a tip off from an Israeli soldier about it, because, and, you know, he was arrested and he's in jail now, just for putting, it was called the Facebook spy case in the Israeli media, because he was ludicrously charged with spying for a so-called enemy state, Syria, by posting stuff on his Facebook page about what was going on.
Amazing.
Yeah, I mean, that got no coverage.
Your article is the first that I had heard of that one.
Yeah, yeah.
It's just, I mean, the only place I've seen it is, it's been on the Syrian state Sanaa website, and it's been on, and they've got an English website, and it's been on Syrian state TV in Arabic.
And Richard Silverstein, the American blogger, he wrote about it.
He was the first place I saw it.
And that's how I first learned about it.
And then the Israeli, because after it came out on the Internet, the Israeli media, the Israeli military dropped the ban because they have this military censorship system in the press.
So, you know, they didn't stop it coming out because it went on the Internet.
So then they kind of partially lifted the gag order.
And so, yeah, I mean, these are all things that are woefully undercover.
And I mean, as I tried to make the point in my last article, if the shoe was on the other foot, so to speak, and it was the Iranians supporting al Qaeda in this way, or even having, you know, contacts with al Qaeda, it would be a major scandal.
I mean, you know, we saw that more than a decade ago, where they tried to say that Saddam Hussein was, you know, in alliance with al Qaeda, which was ridiculous at the time, because al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were, you know, bitter enemies.
And al Qaeda at that time had no presence in the country.
But part of their propaganda was to make up this rubbish about a supposed al Qaeda group that Saddam Hussein was an alliance with.
Of course, we all know that was lies now.
But, of course, ironically, the American and British occupation of Iraq led to a massive resurgence of al Qaeda, you know, and ultimately the birth of the so-called Islamic State.
Now, and that's the whole thing is, you know, George Bush inadvertently, I think, I think everyone would agree, inadvertently scored this huge own goal for al Qaeda by giving them all of Western and Northwestern Iraq to be jihadist and kind of lawless suicide bomber land at war for a decade straight.
But then Obama went and doubled down.
And as we're seeing in this D.I.A. document, the set of D.I.A. documents, he fought directly for the Libyan and Syrian veterans of al Qaeda in Iraq, the guys who were the enemies from the last war, who, again, like you said, were created from the war.
But then Obama followed them home and then took their side in Libya and Syria.
And you have all the two new Judicial Watch documents.
But I went back and double checked the Seymour Hersh piece about the sarin where he debunked the sarin gas attack.
But in there he has a whole section about the rat line.
It's even called the rat line and the red line.
And the rat line is the CIA running all these guns and jihadis after their great victory in against Gaddafi in Libya on to Syria to continue the fight.
So absolutely, it ain't just Israel.
It's you know, the U.S. has been leading the way this whole time.
And I guess, you know, it does seem as though Obama has been somewhat reluctant.
But boy, he sure hasn't been stopping the Israelis, the Turks, the Saudis, the Qataris from doing it or even really trying.
It doesn't look like.
Am I wrong about that, do you think?
No, I think you're absolutely right about that.
And I think there's a lot more that will come out about this.
And I think you make a very good point about Seymour Hersh's Syria articles.
You know, Seymour Hersh is a man I have a lot of respect for as a journalist.
I think he's an excellent journalist.
And he got, of course, his whole career, he's got flak and official denials.
But I've never seen him.
And, you know, I followed his articles all through the Iraq war period and the so-called war on terror period.
And I never saw the response, the bitter response that he got for anything compared to his pieces about Syria.
And as you said, a lot people were very skeptical of those pieces about the Syria chemical weapons from Seymour Hersh.
And, you know, fair enough.
But I think a lot in those articles has been borne out by the facts.
And people should bear that in mind.
Right.
In fact, the New York Times even had to back off and do a sort of semi-official retraction of their claims on the issue as Robert Perry, you know, nailed them to the wall for it.
Yeah.
You know, in backing up that story.
And yeah, in fact, I mean, really, relatively speaking, they kind of just brushed Hersh's Syria article under the rug compared to the way they went after him for the bin Laden story, because that was an attack on the official state religion.
You know, the getting the bad guy and all that.
So they couldn't let that stand.
They had to really attack the hell out of him.
Yeah.
But on the Syria story, they basically just pretended he didn't exist.
Right.
The guy that broke the My Life story and, you know, 10,000 cents.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I mean, I found that really interesting earlier this month when the whole his whole bin Laden article came out.
I mean, I thought it was a great article.
You know, I find it very convincing.
You know, you know, interpretations could vary.
You know, you might not be right about every single detail, but I think it's a very he makes an extremely convincing case.
And I think that the issues at stake in his bin Laden piece are possibly less than the ones about Syria.
Right.
And the implications about Syria.
But it's like you said, it's a state religion.
You know, you can't get all he was really saying in that piece was, well, the administration lied about the particular way that it killed bin Laden.
Right.
It's not a particularly radical thing to say that who really denies that now, except for the except for the White House.
But the reaction to it was insane.
Like it was, oh, what a conspiracy theory.
You're saying the administration lied?
How could you?
You know, it was I mean, it is like a state religion.
You know, it's just when you challenge these things, he got called, you know, a crank and a conspiracy theorist and all these kind of things.
And now he's slowly, as as as we've seen on his record, he's being borne out.
You know, there's being slow trickle of confirmations from independent sources.
And I think more will come out over the following months and years.
Well, you know, you go back to that Syria article and it was about Turkey.
You know, there's been sort of this mythology going on here.
We're talking about this with Gareth Porter the other day on the show.
I hope it's OK.
I'm keeping you a couple minutes over time into the break here.
But there's been this kind of narrative that this is all sort of an accident.
Well, we've been trying to support the FSA and the moderates.
And then, yeah, sort of kind of created the space for on those.
You couldn't even get them to admit that much.
But you go back to Hersh's article about the rat line and the red line.
And it's about Turkey working with Nusra to stage that attack.
You know, this is a very summer of 2013.
And in fact, before that, they already tried.
They had a couple trial runs in the spring of 2013.
This is an extremely important point.
You know, there's there's something in that, you know, it's not all.
It's not all a grand conspiracy where America and the Saudis and everyone knew what they were doing all along.
You know, it's not all.
Things went wrong for them.
You know, they were responding to events.
Absolutely.
You know, things looked especially into it to 2011 when it looked like all these pro American, pro Western government Arab regimes were going to be overthrown.
You know, they were responding to events.
Definitely.
But at the same time, there is a very definite pattern of what they were trying to do.
They were trying to support forces and they're still trying to support forces in the region, which are, to say the least, morally questionable.
And now that we see it's absolutely bizarre what you see now in the mainstream media this week, what we're seeing is an attempted mainstreaming of Al-Qaeda.
They're saying, well, actually, you know, Islamic State is the is the real extremist.
Al-Qaeda maybe is not so bad now.
You know, this this is the we're seeing this in an interview with Al-Jazeera this week with the leader of the Nusra Front.
I mean, it's things that are going on that are absolutely it just boggles the mind, really.
Well, they announced beforehand, you know, that, yeah, we're going to do this rebranding.
We're going to have them say that he doesn't like Zawahiri anymore, which they didn't do that right there.
Just kind of didn't bring up Zawahiri, I guess.
He did.
He said he said the opposite.
He said the Jolani, the leader of Nusra Front in his interview this week with Al-Jazeera, he told he said in the interview, I've been in contact with Zawahiri and he and he and he's making it very clear that he's had recent orders from him.
And it's interesting, actually, the orders apparently the Zawahiri gave him was that they're not going to use Syria as a base to attack the West.
Now, of course, nobody in their right mind believes that.
That's just that's the that's the strategic piast on their behalf.
They want to get as much territory as they can so they can have a base in Syria.
Later on, no doubt there will be blowback.
But they're trying to make this appeal to the West to tacitly let the Saudis support them, the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris support them and send them sophisticated weapons and allow them.
And this is what's happening.
There's been the rebels were starting to fall apart because they were not unified.
But now we got to go, man.
I got to go.
Thank you so much for your time and your great writing.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on.
Enjoyed it.
OK, that's Asa Wynn Stanley, everybody.
He writes for the Electronic Intifada and for Middle East Monitor at Middle East Monitor dot com.
We'll be right back with Ray McGovern.
Just say, hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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