6/25/17 Gareth Porter on how Obama’s CIA backed al Qaeda in Syria

For Pacifica Radio, June the 25th, 2017.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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Alright, introducing again our friend Gareth Porter.
I know I just interviewed him last week.
Well, it's not my fault.
He's got the most important article of the week, by far.
In the American Conservative Magazine, this one is called, How America Armed Terrorists in Syria.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you, sir?
Yeah, thanks again for having me, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Good, good.
Appreciate you joining us again here on the show, Gareth.
And yeah, it's true, I interview you all the time, but it's only because you write all the best stuff.
Most important article, again, obviously of the week here at the American Conservative Magazine, How America Armed Terrorists in Syria.
And you really go through here.
This is, I think, the most complete article as far as detail by detail.
Explaining just exactly, not in any kind of overall sense, but in a very step-by-step kind of sense, how the U.S., the Obama administration, and the CIA armed terrorists in Syria.
And when you say terrorists, you mean al-Qaeda.
I do.
And just to set this up, Scott, I mean, the reason I did this was very explicit, in my mind, and there is an obvious reason for doing this right now.
And that is that Tulsi Gabbard, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, the three-term congresswoman from Hawaii, has put into the hopper a piece of legislation that is not that well-known, but it's very important because it's the first effort really to do something legislatively, legally, about the fact that the United States has indeed been arming the al-Qaeda and its close allies in Syria.
And so what she's done in this legislation is say, no more U.S. policies that will have the effect of transferring arms to the terrorists in Syria, meaning those organizations that have in fact been designated officially as terrorists by the United States and or United Nations.
And secondly, and this is even more important for obvious reasons, she has put into legislation the provision that the United States may not have continued military relations with those states that themselves carry out policies of arming the terrorists in Syria.
So that is, of course, for the last several years, that has been the primary problem that U.S.-Sunni allies in the region, Saudis, Qataris and Turks, have in various ways continued to support financially and with arms the al-Qaeda terrorists and their allies.
Now, you know that this is, I'm making a broad statement here and there are caveats and conditions and so forth, explanations, but that's the big picture.
Let me stop you for just one second, because I think, you know, maybe people immediately will assume that this is some kind of birth or nonsense that, oh, yeah, you're saying that Obama is some secret Muslim and he's on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood and all of this stuff, when actually what you're, and we're going to find this out here in just a moment, but what you're talking about here is Washington, D.C. consensus.
He's not doing this because he's a Black Panther or a Bin Ladenite agent.
He's doing this because he's Ronald Reagan.
Well, exactly.
I mean, you know, this is precisely the point that I've made elsewhere, not so much in this piece.
I don't go into the details of the Obama administration's policy towards Syria in this piece, The American Conservative, but elsewhere I have made the point that Obama was extremely reluctant to get involved in arming any opposition to the Assad regime in Syria because he saw it as a very dangerous policy, knowing what happened in Afghanistan.
And he, in fact, made that argument within the White House meetings.
We know this from various reporting over the years.
So Obama was reluctant, but he caved in to pressure from his Sunni allies.
People who are, you know, even if they don't pay too close of attention, people remember that John McCain had spent years telling Obama, you're not doing enough, you're not doing enough.
So that's the context of this.
It's not, you know, right-wing Black Panther conspiracy theories about Obama.
It's the U.S. national security state, as you put it in the article.
They subordinated what regular Americans would assume would be the highest priority of Middle East terrorism, keeping al-Qaeda down, to some other agendas that, in fact, included going ahead and raising al-Qaeda up.
Well, that's right.
And, of course, it is the national security state.
In this case, you know, particularly it was the CIA.
John Brennan, who became director of CIA later and before that, and particularly it was David Petraeus, who was director of the CIA when this all began.
And that's really where I start the story of how the Obama administration did, in fact, carry out policies that armed the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria.
Right, so that's what, in 2011, right around the time they're finally killing Osama, then Petraeus starts taking Osama's side in North Africa?
Well, of course, the bin Laden hit was May of 2011, and this really started late in the year.
This was a scheme that was cooked up in late 2011 by Petraeus.
In response to a situation, which I'll try to characterize very briefly, I don't go into it in the piece, but what happened was that Obama was telling the Sunni allies, no, I'm not willing to provide arms directly to the armed opposition in Syria, as you have asked me to do, which is what happened.
But we will come up with a scheme that will help you do it.
And that was, in fact, the Petraeus scheme that was really based on a set of dummy corporations, dummy businesses in Libya that were basically tasked by the CIA with facilitating the shipment of arms from the former Gaddafi government stocks to Syria, basically, to the armed opposition.
This is what Hillary Clinton called the bank shot in the New York Times, right?
I think that's right.
I did not get into that, a Hillary Clinton role in this, but she was certainly very much involved in supporting it, absolutely.
And I just like that very memorable phrase.
Yeah, see what we'll do, we'll take our jihadis and guns from Libya, and then we'll move them on to the next project in Syria.
It's kind of like a bank shot.
Isn't that neat?
Yeah, right, exactly.
That's the way she thought, and she did, in fact, prevail on that.
Absolutely, Petraeus was, as his mistress and hagiographer put it, he was all in on this one.
So it was indeed a combination of Hillary Clinton, she played an important role politically in this, but Petraeus was the one who dreamed up the idea and pushed it hard within the White House meetings.
All right, now we've all heard a ton of nonsense about Benghazi, but you have something important to say about Benghazi.
Well, right.
I mean, you know, I do try to detail the results, first of all, of this program that they dreamed up of shipping, helping to have the arms shipped from Libya, Libyan stocks to Syria.
And what this really involved was a lot of RPGs, that is basically anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons, a lot of small arms, no really heavy weapons, none of the big weapons, but that was the beginning.
It was the beginning of the process.
I don't think it had a terribly big impact these first several months.
So, you know, that was, it was not the most important part of this story.
This was just the initial part.
But of course, what happened in Benghazi in September 2012 was, of course, that the Islamist rebels there, they weren't rebels, in fact, well, they were, they had been rebels, but they had already taken power, was that these Islamist Libyan jihadists were attacking the Benghazi CIA station there that was involved directly in this scheme that Petraeus had dreamed up.
So that's where Ambassador Stevens was killed, along with a few others.
And that ended the entire scheme that Petraeus had come up with.
And from then on, that was no longer involved.
But in the meantime, the CIA had started a second phase of helping the, particularly the Saudis, as well as other Sunni allies, to shop for arms in the former Soviet states in Eastern, Central Eastern Europe.
Now, stop right there for just one second, because I want to get to that phase of it in just a second.
But I want to focus on Benghazi for just a moment here.
The Republicans beat this whole country and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party over the head about Benghazi.
It was sort of their whitewater scandal, you know, compared to the Clinton-eers kind of thing that they tried to use against Obama over and over again.
But all they ever talked about was, there wasn't enough security there.
And this kind of, where was the response?
How come you didn't come and rescue the men immediately?
Who answered the phone call at what time?
But what they never discussed was the larger context of what was going on in Benghazi.
You just kind of touched on it for a second there.
But it's, yeah, this is sort of the heart of our story here.
This ambassador was stationed directly in the middle of the hornet's nest.
And I don't mean hornets meaning the people of Benghazi, but I mean the rebels who won the war with America and NATO's help against Qaddafi.
Many of them were veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They were, as you just said, jihadists and members of these jihadist groups.
So Petraeus had this smart idea.
We'll befriend them and use them.
But that doesn't mean that they like us.
We're still America to them.
And so September 11th comes, and for whichever different reasons, they attack and kill the guy at the embassy.
And it's almost like the Republicans' accusations about how security wasn't good enough, which of course is true in effect, but their argument of that, their accusations against Obama amounted to a cover-up of the real question of what were they even doing there.
Exactly the phrase I was going to use is basically the Republicans and the Democrats were together involved in covering up the reality that this was really all about the U.S. CIA helping to ship weapons to Syria to try to bring down Assad.
And of course Chris Stevens was there clearly representing Hillary Clinton's interests.
There's no question that he was involved in it very deeply, and that was at her behest.
And a lot of foreshadowing there too, right?
I mean that just goes to show that these, Hillary Clinton, David Petraeus, and Panetta, and whoever was all involved in successfully foisting at least part of this policy on Obama, they're too clever by half from the get-go, right?
This is just a year into the Arab Spring project here, into Libya.
It was basically almost the one-year anniversary of the overthrow of Qaddafi, and this thing already completely blew up in their face.
So what'd they do?
Keep going, only in Syria.
Too clever by half is the epitaph, if you will, of the war makers, the war machine in the United States.
Hillary Clinton's campaign for president, too.
Yes.
You know, it's like too much power goes to your head and makes you stupid, and that's exactly what happened here.
All right, now I'm sorry, get to Petraeus, and the next phase is, all right, let's go to Eastern Europe and buy some guns from them.
And you're saying that they're doing this because Obama won't just give them guns.
Obama says, no, make it deniable for me at least, guys, right?
Exactly.
He continued to take the position he did not want to be involved directly in this business of providing guns to the opposition.
So in a sense, it's the Obama playing the role of being too clever by half, because somehow he believed that that was a lesser evil, when in fact, you know, it was just as evil as providing the guns directly.
Anyway, so what happened was that the Sunni allies, particularly it was the Saudis who were spending the big bucks going to these Eastern European former Soviet regimes and buying hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons.
And these were, I won't go into the details of the kinds of weapons that were purchased, but there were millions, tens of millions of rounds of ammunition.
There were tanks, there were heavy weapons being purchased here by the Saudis with the help of, I mean, the U.S. was not directly involved in the negotiations after initially introducing them, apparently.
But once the U.S. had gotten the process started, the CIA helping them, the Saudis were very, very seriously involved in buying weapons that did in fact make a huge difference in the balance of power, the balance of military power in the Syrian war.
And I make the point that, I make two points.
First of all, what the Saudis were doing was purchasing the weapons for a conventional war.
This was not a guerrilla war.
These were not lightly armed guerrillas.
They were preparing to seize power through military force in Syria through the armed opposition.
And the second point that I make in the piece is that the most important Saudi purchase was in fact from the United States itself.
It was the sale by the Pentagon of thousands and thousands of TOW anti-tank missiles.
Now, these were missiles that the armed opposition could use really to shoot the Syrian government tanks very effectively, much more effectively than they could have otherwise.
And they did in fact, as I point out in the piece, play a very important role in 2015 when they began to arrive in larger numbers in Syria.
And so what was going on here was that the U.S. was selling these TOW anti-tank missiles to the Saudis with the understanding that they would be doled out to the specific organizations that the CIA indicated it wanted them to be given to.
So this was in effect, you know, a U.S. transfer of these TOW anti-tank missiles to the organizations that they, the armed organizations in Syria that they wanted to get them with the Saudis playing the role of middleman.
Meaning you're saying the Free Syrian Army, the moderate rebels as the Americans call them.
Right.
I mean, they were not planning to have these go directly to Al-Qaeda by any means.
That's very clear that that was the Obama administration's intention.
But of course, as I point out, that's not exactly what happened.
And it was naive in the extreme to believe that they could ship these TOW anti-tank missiles to their favorite so-called moderate opposition folks and think that they would not end up in the hands of Al-Qaeda because the very organizations that they were planning to send them to already had working close military relationships with Al-Qaeda in Syria.
So they were, again, just making assumptions that they could keep them separate against the information that they certainly should have had, certainly did have, that indicated the opposite.
It was, again, being too clever by half.
Yeah.
I just typed in to make sure I was still right, 2012, Nusra, Al-Qaeda.
And there it's in the New York Times and McClatchy newspapers, among others, I guess, that by the end of 2012, it was even the U.S. government, the State Department and others, that so-called the rebels in Syria, that the field is dominated by the Al-Nusra Front.
And the Al-Nusra Front is just the name for Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the new name for Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who were the leaders of the bad guys from Iraq War II and the Sunni-based insurgency there.
And we all already knew that all along.
This is an absolutely crucial point, Scott, the fact that the working-level, not the working-level people, the policy-making people in the Obama administration knew for a fact that Al-Qaeda in Syria was already the dominant political military force in the opposition, that the folks that we wanted to support were, in fact, linked to them through these local alliances, these local military organizations or military alliances that basically carried out the fighting in various parts of northern and central Syria, that these were the realities that they were facing.
And so it does raise the most serious questions about the judgment of people in the national security state, the war state, if you will, that they could make these decisions thinking that they could get away with somehow manipulating the circumstances in such a way that would avoid the obvious dangers that went with this.
And I remember writing, certainly in 2015, that it was so clear that they were thinking they were playing God, that they could somehow manipulate the supply of weapons in such a way as to avoid them falling into the hands of Al-Qaeda, despite the fact that it was very clear that that was what was happening.
And so, yeah, I mean, this is just – and I think that the ultimate reality is the one that you introduced at the beginning of the show, and I want to repeat it, that the United States military, but particularly the CIA and the national security state, were betraying the fundamental interests of the American people that they were sworn to uphold, which were basically to avoid and to oppose terrorism in the Middle East, and particularly in the case of Syria, where clearly Al-Qaeda was gaining a foothold.
So they were betraying these fundamental interests in Syria, and of course that's not the only place it happened, but this is really the central theater where this was going on during the Obama administration.
All right, so now what this ended up leading to, of course, just like is predicted in the DIA memo, is that this could lead to an Islamic state in eastern Syria, and even there's a danger, it says, of this blowing back all the way into western Iraq, which was basically already a stateless territory that was pretty much open for taking.
We just see this coming.
You can go back and listen to my interviews and see it coming for a couple years.
So it turned into the Islamic state, but then we bomb the Islamic state back out of existence again.
And then so my question is, why would they take such risks?
And it's not naivete, right?
They know what they're doing.
They play with this fire.
I don't think they wanted it to get that bad.
I'm not saying they deliberately created the Islamic state, but they deliberately tolerated the rise of ISIS, and it led to the Islamic state, and a whole new war there, Iraq War III now.
And so what is the priority, Gareth, then, if the priority is not keeping al-Qaeda down?
If raising up al-Qaeda can be a means to an end, what end?
That's the question, and here's the answer.
It's always the same answer.
You get that every time you interview me, practically, and that is that it was the bureaucratic interests of the CIA, particularly, that dominated this process.
And what is the business of the CIA?
It's carrying out premier interests of the CIA is carrying out big operations.
This was a big operation for them.
And if you very carefully comb through the New York Times stories, you find that in 2013, they were chasing at the fact that Obama had allowed them to carry out some operations, but it was too small.
It was too small.
And they were saying, they were complaining to the New York Times that it needed to be much more.
And so you have to think about this in terms of what is the business, quote unquote, of the CIA.
It's to carry out big military-type operations.
The drone war is one of them, but this is the kind of big operation that they covet.
And so that was the drive that really was behind what was going on in the Obama administration.
It's very clear.
So basically, we have to attack the bureaucratic organizations.
In this case, the CIA that are really behind these policies and which have such power that they basically are able to drive the White House into a policy that it was resisting.
Well, so part of what I remember at the time was, well, for example, Barack Obama's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the spring of 2012 when he said, That's right, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Taking Assad out and having a regime change there is a great way to take Iran down a peg because, of course, Israel's biggest worry in the region is Shiite power and Iranian support for Hezbollah through Syria.
So that's what we're doing.
Hope it helps make you happy.
And it was all in the context of, in fact, the title of the article is, As President, I Don't Bluff.
I promise, no matter what, I won't let Iran get a nuclear weapon.
The whole article was basically geared toward the Israelis in the first place, that this is how I'm going to placate you.
I'm going to make a nuclear deal with Iran, but I'm going to attack Assad in Syria for you.
Well, of course, you're right.
At that point, the Obama administration was eager to demonstrate to the world that it was very much aligned with the Saudis against Iran.
This was a high priority for them.
Remember, that was when they were trying to sell the Iran nuclear deal.
And so they were under attack by the Saudis for their nuclear deal.
And so what you see here in this interview and elsewhere in other places during that period is the Obama administration really emphasizing the fact that everywhere in the Middle East, it's supporting the Saudis against Iranian interventionism in the region.
What about Israel?
And Israel played a role.
There's no doubt about it.
I mean, I haven't mentioned that.
I didn't talk about it in my piece.
But it's worth recalling that in April of 2012, the then defense minister of Israel was giving an interview in which he said, well, you know, maybe it's time for us to take seriously the problem of the Assad regime.
And this was brought to the attention of Hillary Clinton immediately, and it's very clear that she was very responsive to the newly discovered Israeli interest in bringing down the Assad regime.
And, of course, we all remember when Obama almost bombed the Syrian government over the sarin hoax of 2013, of August-September 2013, that the only interest group in America that was supporting him was the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, APAC, and a couple of associated groups, and the outright vanguard of the neoconservative movement, Bill Kristol and Charles McLamoran.
Right, and just to put a fine point on it, I mean, she was extremely well aware that her single major donor was the guy who basically finances the Brookings Institution Middle East Center, named after him, Khaim Saban, and that he was quite eager to have the United States play a role in Syria.
So this was clearly a motivation for her to be involved in this.
And I'm not trying to hang it all on Israel or anything, but I just want to point out, we've all read A Clean Break and Coping with Crumbling States, and we know the Dick Cheney-ite, David Wormser view of what's, you know, and in fact, David Wormser said back in the 1990s that, yeah, you know, this policy of focusing on getting rid of the Ba'athists could lead to a rise of jihadist-type terrorism, but, oh well, you know, this is definitely more important than that.
Scott, I have to point out, though, however, the fact that until April 2012, the Israelis were not calling on the United States to support regime change in Syria.
In fact, their policy was, well, you know, Assad is bad, but he's the devil we know.
They were concerned about what would happen after Assad if he was overthrown.
And it was only in April 2012 that they began to say, okay, well, you know, we're beginning to change our mind about this now, because they saw an opportunity, apparently, to get this done quickly.
Of course, the Israeli government and the neoconservative movement in America are different things, and I shouldn't conflate them too readily.
They often are not exactly on the same page.
No, but the Israelis did come around, and I think it was important, particularly for Hillary Clinton, that that was the case.
But it's interesting, and I think it's important to know that the Israelis, right up until April 2012, were in fact hesitating, to say the least, about regime change in Syria.
So, Gareth, I have to ask you one more thing quick before we have to go, which is, what about Donald Trump?
And is the CIA continuing to back the mythical moderates, a.k.a. al-Qaeda, in Syria?
My impression is that that is no longer the case, that they believe that this was no longer a winning hand.
And I think now, I mean, the Trump administration is intervening militarily, but I don't think it's specifically on behalf of the same people that the CIA was supporting.
I mean, that's an impressionistic view, but that's the way it looks to me.
They have hit a couple al-Qaeda targets, but, I mean, in other words, are you getting the picture that they have told the Turks and the Qataris and the Saudis, I guess Qataris and the Saudis have their own problems these days, but as the CIA told them, all right, that's over, and they really are turning that policy around?
I'm not clear on exactly how that's working out, but the Turks have their own questions.
I think they're trying to keep their links to their Amnusia Front friends, but they're also, they have other overriding interests, so it's more complicated.
All right, well, I'm sorry, we're all out of time.
Thank you so much for your time again on the show, Gareth.
You're the best.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is the great Gareth Porter, and this one is in the American Conservative magazine.
It's called How America Armed Terrorists in Syria, and it's all the proof you need there.
I mean, this is the case.
Right there, theamericanconservative.com, How America Armed Terrorists in Syria.
I'm Scott Horton.
This has been Anti-War Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much, everybody, for listening.
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