09/18/15 – Brad Hoff – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Brad Hoff from LevantReport.com.
Welcome back.
Brad, how are you?
Always great to be on, Scott.
Thank you.
Very happy to have you here.
Hey, so this article, right now you can find it at LevantReport.com.
We'll be running it over the weekend, probably the spotlight article over the weekend at AntiWar.com as well, in case you need to find it there.
Hell of a headline, great follow-up from yesterday's interview with Mitch Prothero.
Islamic State leader Omar al-Shishani fought under U.S. umbrella as late as 2013.
So just real quick, in case anybody missed it, Mitch Prothero at McClatchy Newspapers did a story about this guy that he had actually met back in 2008.
He was an American-trained, I guess a sergeant or something, I think, in the Georgian military, was a hero, quote-unquote, of the war with Russia that Shakhashvili started in 2008.
And then he decided, along with a lot of the other people from his town his age, to up and move off to Turkey and go to fight the jihad against Syria.
The one that, as we just talked about with Eric Margulies, could have been avoided completely back in 2011 and 12.
But anyway, so now apparently Brad Hoff read Mitch Prothero's piece and was reminded of something or something and did this follow-up for us.
Please do tell, sir.
So much of the article is based on a fairly recent book that just came out this year, last spring, by a freelance journalist named Benjamin Hall, who writes for the New York Times and various other publications.
But he wrote a book called Inside ISIS, The Brutal Rise of a Terrorist Army, and he was embedded among rebels in northern Syria in 2012 to 2013.
And most significant, he has a whole chapter dealing with this major battle which marked a turning point in terms of the rebel advance on Aleppo.
The rebels had this important air base under siege.
It's called Menegh Air Base.
And the battle, which kind of went on and off for two years, and the last final siege went on a period of eight months, was a huge, huge morale booster when the rebels actually finally captured the air base from the government in August of 2013.
But this embedded journalist writes that the big turning point was when Omar the Chechen and his band of Chechen jihadists showed up, and they came right in within the local military command structure, which at that time was the Revolutionary Military Council of Aleppo, directly backed by the United States and Britain, with our man, Colonel Abdul-Jabbar al-Okaidi, in charge.
And Omar the Chechen fit right in, and he sent his suicide bombers to attack the base.
And Benjamin Hall in this new book describes that singular point as the turning point.
Here's a quote from the book.
The base only fell when the FSA were joined by the ISIS leader Abu Omar Shoshani and his brutal gang of Chechens.
When we had been there, it had been under the sole control of badly funded, badly armed rebels with little knowledge of tactical warfare.
But as soon as Shoshani arrived, Omar the Chechen, he took control of the operation, and the base fell soon after.
So he says the so-called secular moderate rebels only made headway in Aleppo province when Omar the Chechen showed up.
Alright, and now, I think we've kind of known all along that, you know, really the fighters who are doing any winning, actually, against Assad are the guys who don't mind dying.
In other words, guys who are the furthest things from what you call moderate, or moderates.
And so, yeah, here's the case in point, right?
The moderates hang back and snipe, if they are moderate at all, hang back and snipe from the border.
Then come in the guys who really mean business, send in the suicide bombers, and get the work done.
But now, so, jeez, I don't know, Brad, Syria's far away, there's a lot of territory at play here, a lot of it in flux, a lot of different groups with names I've never heard of, and so forth.
And so maybe this is just a thing, what exactly is the connection, or how tight is that connection, between the revolutionary military council of Aleppo, the United States, and its allies, and then this guy, this Colonel Okaidi, as you describe it, who then, and then I guess if you could also elaborate on his relationship with Omar the Chechen, you know, from there as well.
Because, you know, an apologist would say, well, we back the mythical moderates, and you know what, yeah, it's true, one time some suicide bombers showed up and helped them, but still they're our enemies, and we're just very moderate, or whatever, and that'd be the end of it, right?
That's what the Democrats would say.
Right, so, yeah, when 2012, 2012 and summer 2013, I mean, ISIS was just another group no one had ever heard of, either.
And that's what allowed them to very seamlessly enter within this command structure with Colonel Okaidi on top.
So that's what's interesting.
I mean, we now see Omar the Chechen's red-bearded face all over the media, and you trace his role in the Syrian conflict back to 2012, 2013.
He's serving under the command of these guys like Okaidi that we directly back.
The interesting thing about Okaidi is that he was a big media sensation in 2012, and especially in 2013, because Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who's the U.S. State Department's top man in Syria, was going into Syria and having his picture taken with him.
Okaidi was widely reported, and especially British press, to be the U.K. and U.S.A.'s top man in Syria as the main conduit of Western aid into Aleppo, where the main battle raged at that time.
And interesting about the fall of Menegh Air Base, which is also what I based a lot of my reporting on, there's all these videos in Arabic and in Russian by major regional media like Al Jazeera out there showing the aftermath of the regime base's fall, where all these rebel groups are celebrating, they weren't shy about giving interviews, and so we have Okaidi sitting there praising his team, which includes an ISIS commander named Abu Jandal and other fighters, Okaidi, who only a couple months prior had been officially sanctioned by Robert Ford, and you can see media segments that deal with this, even NPR, even NPR talking about Okaidi and Robert Ford.
Robert Ford is standing around with his guys kind of like a victorious basketball team, as the New York Times reported, praising this ISIS commander.
In other interviews we have Omar the Chechen himself standing with some of the same guys that had just been standing around Okaidi, talking to the camera.
These guys weren't shy about giving interviews, so there's all this profusion of old source media material online that no one has really translated.
And so, yeah, I went back and examined some of this stuff.
Abu Omar is giving some interviews in Russian, which is his more comfortable language, being a Chechen from Georgia, and he's making brief statements in Arabic to al-Jazeera.
But these guys didn't hide it, and so what we see at the time is that the FSA and this nascent, emergent ISIS, they were fighting as one underneath the Revolutionary Military Council of Aleppo, and the key guy around which all of these guys sort of gathered was Colonel Abdul-Jabbar Okaidi, who, by the way, didn't go away.
I mean, you can still find his face on CNN.
Yeah, I was going to ask you, now that Omar the Chechen is the military leader of the Islamic State, where is Okaidi?
On CNN, giving interviews about why we need to let these Chechens call in airstrikes against Assad, or what?
Yeah, it's amazing, because since then, Robert Ford admitted this relationship.
Robert Ford gave a kind of sham attempt at an apology to McClatchy reporter Hala Alam, I think it is.
I'm sorry, hold it right there, Brad.
I asked you the question way too close to the break here.
We're going to be right back out with Brad Hoff from LevantReport.com.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Listen, a couple things before we wrap up for the week and get back to Brad in just a sec here.
I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to mention this earlier in the show, but I got to.
There was an essay that ran in The New York Times day before yesterday.
It was written by a Yemeni about going and digging his dead sister-in-law out of the rubble after the Saudis killed her with a missile in America's war over there.
100% American ownership of the war against Yemen going on right now.
It's unbelievable to me that that was published in The New York Times, but it's really something that you got to take a look at, please.
And then also today, it's the spotlight on Antiwar.com.
I mean, yeah, and again, you wouldn't believe it.
It's an essay published in The New York Times based on Phil Giraldi's essay that we interviewed him about here on the show a couple of months ago about the American deep state and how it's just like in Turkey.
The national security state, the corruption, the influence peddling, the mass murder and the budget deficits, it's all there.
So Phil Giraldi wrote this killer piece and then it got written up, basically, in The New York Times.
Who really rules America, something like that, right along those lines.
That's the spotlight today on Antiwar.com and really deserves your attention.
I hope you'll go and look at that.
And then the other thing is I wanted to mention that there's a reason, as you know, that you don't get to hear stuff like this anywhere else, really, and that's because there's no money in being an anti-war monger.
There's plenty of money in mongering war.
Most of the pro-war mongers, they don't ever even have to actually confront an anti-war argument because there's none being made because there is no anti-war industry.
The only people who are anti-war on a steady basis, like me and Antiwar.com, we rely on donations from people like you, that's it.
There's no crony to be served in doing what we're doing.
You understand that, and so you understand the asymmetric nature of this battle, and I think you know which side you're on, so support your local anti-war monger, that's all.
Now, speaking of anti-war mongering, check out LevantReport.com.
Brad Hoff has been doing some great work there on the war in Syria and America and our allies' role in it, the DIA report that came out and all that kind of stuff.
So where we left off, and sorry for going on so long during your interview here, Brad, but where we left off, we were talking about this guy, Okaidi, from the Free Syrian Army, his relationship with American Ambassador Robert Ford, as well as his relationship with Omar the Chechen, Omar Shashani, the current leader of the Islamic State's military, who was also reported on by McClatchy Newspapers' Mitch Prothero this week as being actually trained by American Special Forces in the first place back in Georgia, where he's from.
And then, Brad, you were addressing Robert Ford and his sort of half-apology for his work in supporting the Mujahideen there?
So, yeah, there's been so much evidence, including video evidence, that has come out about Okaidi's relationship with Islamic State fighters, that Robert Ford very recently issued a kind of apology or explanation to McClatchy News Bureau in an article written by Hanna Alam, and he made this kind of lame attempt to cover his track, saying, look, I called Okaidi after this video surfaced and told him this is a really bad thing, I'm furious, stop working with the Islamic State guys or we'll cut off your paycheck.
And I don't know that a lot of people know about this, partly because there's all these videos of these victory speeches after these various battles in Aleppo in 2013, when all these guys were working together, that are untranslated.
And they exist only in Arabic, and in some instances with Omar the Chechen in Russian.
And so they're just now kind of slowly, increasingly being translated.
You know what, you send me those Omar the Chechen interviews and I'll have my wife translate them.
She's Ukrainian, she speaks Russian.
Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, I know that in one of the videos that is linked to in my article, he gives his interview primarily in Russian.
I do know that he talks fundamentally about how the FSA had been attacking Menegh Air Base for about eight months, he's praising the FSA.
And in a much later interview with a Russian pro-jihadi website, he actually talks about his relationship with the FSA, the US-backed fighters, as being pragmatic.
Basically he says, so long as they don't get in our way, we don't fight them.
We're not fighting the whole of the FSA, only the ones that are not on board with our vision of an Islamic State.
But yeah, I think the most interesting, most bizarre part of my article comes at the end.
Everyone needs to check out Okaidi, given like eight minutes of virtually uninterrupted airtime on Christiane Amanpour's show, simply called Amanpour.
This is supposed to be like the flagship foreign affairs show for CNN, and this is July 2015.
I mean, you've got to see this.
They set him up with a translator.
They give him like six to eight full minutes to appeal to Western countries and the American people that the US should imply a no-fly zone and a buffer zone for the sake of the so-called moderate rebels.
But at the same time, you can see his face all over the internet posing with known ISIS commanders from 2013.
No, I don't get it.
I just don't get it.
Oh yeah, well, nah, sure you do.
It's all about weakening Iran's fluence because that's what our allies want over there and that kind of thing.
But now I want to point out here about McClatchy Newspapers that, you know, we got some friends there do some really good journalism like David Enders who was covering.
He's not there anymore, but he was covering the early part of the Syria war very early on, and I believe it was him.
And, you know, Roy Gutman, he's bad on some things, maybe a lot of things, but he does some really good journalism too sometimes.
But they reported, and it may have even been Hannah Lomb or Nancy Youssef.
I forget exactly now who McClatchy was.
But they reported very early on in this war.
If it was 2012, it could have been early 2013.
I think probably more likely it was 2012, saying that, you know, the Obama administration is saying that, yes, this Nusra Front, the Association of Helpers, or whatever they call themselves, these guys are nothing but al-Qaeda in Iraq.
We recognize them as such, and we ban any support to them.
And this is very early on.
So there's no playing dumb about the Islamic State, you know, which didn't really break off again or attempt to rename Nusra, ISIS, and then they had the fight between Ghalani and Baghdadi about who was who and who was taking orders and whatever.
But that didn't even really happen until the spring of 2013.
So, you know, we're still talking about, you know, al-Qaeda at that time and where the government completely admitted it.
Of course, Ben Swann, the great libertarian journalist Ben Swann, confronted Barack Obama about this to his face.
He said, you're drone bombing Pakistan and Yemen to kill al-Qaeda, but you're backing them in Syria.
Why?
And Obama says, oh, well, blah, blah, blah, about something about vetting them and making sure that only moderates get our support.
But meanwhile, as you're saying, this is going on right at the very same time.
And you know what?
Even at the Small Wars Journal and places like that, there are no libertarians or non-interventionists.
But they've been screaming their head off for years about, look at al-Qaeda guys with American weapons that they obviously got from the FSA.
Right.
And it's a real practical matter.
I mean, one does not need to make it an elaborate, intentional CIA plot.
I'm going to quote from Mitch Prothera's excellent article this week.
He quotes a Georgian Army soldier that had fought alongside Omar the Chechen before he was the big radical Omar the Chechen.
He said, we were well-trained by American special forces units, and he was the star pupil.
So when he shows up with his band of radicals in northern Syria in 2012 and 2013, you know what?
It's a fight for their lives.
They want the best fighters.
They want the best fighters.
Even the U.S.-backed Colonel Al-Qaeda, he wants the best fighters.
Who are the best fighters but the al-Qaeda radicals.
It just makes so much sense.
And you know, it makes sense too that the CIA would say, well, we know this guy.
He's all right.
And might not see, you know, the way Prothera writes that he really made a change from one guy to the other sort of a thing.
But really it makes sense that they would have seen him as maybe not so bad.
They got his documents right here.
Right.
Yeah.
No one would foresee that ISIS would become this sort of ultra-scary boogeyman, the sort of new international terror brand that you, you know, hear about every moment you get in your car and turn on NPR.
I mean, like I said earlier, ISIS at the time was just another group.
And reporting on ISIS only slowly started to emerge that fall of 2013.
And so then it becomes more of a sort of public relations nightmare as we look back on all of this, like, source material video footage, I mean, from like Al Jazeera, legitimate established regional outlets who are showing all these ISIS guys hanging out with all the FSA guys who guys like Robert Ford are very publicly vouching for.
Right.
And so if people go to my article, I want them to spend time clicking on these links, watching the videos.
And one of the links is a translated montage that it's had independent confirmation in terms of the accuracy of the translations from the Arabic.
Joshua Landis at the University of Oklahoma at one point promoted this video on his Twitter account.
It's still not had the kind of viewership it needs.
RT News this summer kind of played it over and over again when it reported on the 2012 DIA document.
But more people need to see this stuff, and then CNN can't get away with allowing Colonel O'Keefe to just continue to get up there and propagandize the American people on its flagship program.
But, of course, when you listen to Amanpour, I mean, that's basically like listening to the State Department itself, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and always has been, too.
She's even married to a guy.
At the time that she was very much helping to get the Kosovo war going, she was married to the State Department spokesman.
And they were like newlyweds, too, newly in love, as they're telling the story to the Americans of why we got a free Kosovo for the KLA.
You know, the Bin Laden Knights of the Balkans, basically.
But, yeah, and now the thing is, though, about no one could see in the Islamic State, just another group, I think I'll differ with you a little bit there again.
It was known, I mean, al-Qaeda in Iraq renamed itself the Islamic State of Iraq for the first time back in 2006.
And back then it was a pipe dream, but it was pretty clear what their agenda was.
And at the time that they broke off, and again, back to McClatchy News, at the time that they were fighting with al-Nusra over who was in charge and what their plan was and all of that, they were making clear right then, that was publicly in the papers in the spring of 2013, early in 2013, that these guys were fighting and what the Islamic State group wanted was to create a state.
And then it came out, I guess, a couple of months later, maybe a month later, that Zawahiri had taken the side of Gholani and told Baghdadi to go back to Iraq.
And then Baghdadi said, I'll go back to Iraq when I'm good and ready, and how are you going to enforce your commands from your mom's basement in Pakistan, boss, and whatever.
And that was where the big fight came from.
And as you've documented beyond anyone else, and as you just referred to, the DIA document warning that these guys could create an Islamic State and even import it back into Iraq, into lawless western Iraq, is a real danger.
They warned that in August of 2012, the same time it was being warned about by the likes of Patrick Coburn on this show.
No, you're exactly right.
And I think government insiders, they knew and they know what's going on.
And I think people that follow closely, like you, like people that follow antiwar.com, for example, I think they're going to know.
But kind of middle America guy clicking on his primetime news at home, if he sees a group called Northern Storm Brigade and John McCain standing beside them in northern Syria, I mean, he's not going to know.
Yeah, but speaking of Northern Storm Brigade, actually, the article was kind of getting too long, so I didn't want to cover that.
But there's a lot of video footage of Northern Storm Brigade also on the battlefield that day, August 6, 2013.
Oh, great.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, that's a hugely important one because those are the guys where, and of course I got the clip actually of McCain saying, oh, we can vet these guys.
It's fine.
We can vet them.
The Northern Storm Brigade was on video being interviewed by Time magazine before John McCain ever went over there, saying, yeah, we're veterans of the Iraq war where we fought with Zarqawi against the Americans.
And then after he went and hung out with them over there, a couple of years later it turned out, well, actually soon after it turned out that they had been involved in the kidnapping of some Shia religious pilgrim civilians from Lebanon.
But then it also came out later on that they were the ones who had sold Sotloff, Stephen Sotloff, to ISIS, who later cut his head off, the American journalists over there.
These were John McCain's, those are the guys, unlike some of the conspiracy stuff said that was Baghdadi on the poor.
It wasn't Baghdadi, but it was guys who were buddies with Baghdadi and willing to sell American prisoners to Baghdadi.
Same damn difference.
The fact that John McCain is still in the Senate right now, it's just a tribute to the ignorance of the American people on this issue.
That's it.
Because there's just no question of how scandalous that truly is if it was understood.
Anyone with lesser political status would be in prison right now for sure.
But, yeah, I'll try to dig up that.
There's some source video out there.
Again, it's in Arabic, so we haven't had a lot of exposure to it this side of the world.
But, yeah, there's a lot of untranslated video out there.
You know what?
Send me the ones that you think are like the maybe two or three very most important ones of those videos, and I'll see if maybe I can think of who I might get to translate them for us.
Sure, yeah.
Sure, I'll work on that.
But, yeah, Northern Storm Brigade, the John McCain's group, they are there at Minag Air Base fighting alongside of Omar the Chechen and his fearsome Islamic State fighters.
He's sending those suicide bombers in like they're nothing as well, which, as I mentioned in the article, Benjamin Hall, this author of Inside ISIS, he talks about when they show up with this sort of aura, this mystique, and everyone looks up to them.
I kind of struggled to interpret this as, well, is the FSA commanding the ISIS jihadi units, or is it the ISIS jihadi units commanding the FSA at the Battle of Minag Air Base?
And I just kind of presented it as really there's a kind of cooperative unified command.
But guess what?
They're all under the official FSA structure that at that time had been funded officially by the State Department.
And in one of the last videos I post, if you watch near the end of this long Omar the Chechen video, they've got some sleek communication devices.
Make note of that.
Yeah.
Well, there's pictures of some of these guys standing in USAID tents.
It's got National Endowment for Democracy written on it.
I guess it says USAID written all over it.
Don't even hide it.
Right.
Exactly.
There's another guy that's really gotten away with a lot, hasn't had much coverage.
If anyone has some energy, they'd need to call him up, investigate this.
But Congressman Adam Kinzinger, a congressman from Illinois, he went in September 2014.
He was hanging out with the same, Colonel Okaidi in Turkey, trying to bolster support for some newly formed group of moderates.
I think that's where Okaidi hangs out now, just in Turkish resorts giving CNN interviews.
But CNN footage of Congressman Adam Kinzinger hanging out with a guy that had once exercised operational command over ISIS.
All right.
Now we're over time here anyway.
If you've got to go, you've got to go.
But otherwise, I want to ask you one more thing.
Sure.
Shoot.
Okay.
So this is a very good point, and it's one that I absolutely assent to here.
First was the tweet by Charles Lister, the al-Qaeda expert at the Brookings Institution, who, by the way, recently reported that there's a room, he called it, in Turkey where Americans and Saudis run the Army of Conquest, which includes the al-Nusra Front.
How exactly that plays into al-Nusra's betrayal of the DOD trained few dozen there a couple of weeks ago, I'm not exactly sure.
But then more important, I think, to address is Moon of Alabama, which is a great blog, and they're really great on Ukraine and Syria issues and a lot of things here.
And they respond to him, hey, how come, oh, oh, I'm sorry.
Lister says, oh, an 80 percent increase in U.S.-trained and equipped fighters deployed in Syria from five to nine, 11 more on their way.
So he's joking, and this is the big joke going around, about how few of the DOD-trained mythical moderates were able to do a damn thing.
And, again, it was Prothero who reported in McClatchy, based on many, many sources, good ones, it seemed, about how the Turks had al-Nusra kill these guys, betray them and kill some and kidnap the rest and this kind of deal.
But then Moon of Alabama says, hey, Charles Lister, how come you always, quote, forget the 10,000 the CIA had deployed before the DOD ever did any of this?
And then he makes a crack about, does taking Qatari money lead to amnesty, or amnesia, I guess he's trying to say.
And Qatari money being a reference to who funds the Brookings Institution, of course, there.
So that is the deal, is there were thousands and thousands of these guys.
Again, McClatchy, the great Jonathan Landay has told me, hey, I've seen these guys.
I went with CIA to the bases in Jordan where they've been training them for years.
But he says they mostly amount to just a National Guard to keep the Islamic State out of Jordan.
And that's basically it at this point.
But, you know, I don't know.
And I don't know about 10,000, but what do you know about that?
Well, you know, I like to think that a lot of your sort of run-of-the-mill military guys are a little bit smarter.
And I'm almost thinking this whole train-and-equip mission has gone so horribly.
There's almost, it seems like a purposeful slow playing.
But, of course, we know the CIA can do anything it wants because there's no accountability or oversight.
We're never going to know ultimately, I mean, until we have some declassified documents like 20, 30 years from now, right?
But I think the official Pentagon train-and-equip program, it just, I don't know that we can be that stupid as far as this.
Oh, we put out five U.S. backtravels.
I think there's almost a purposeful slow playing, I think.
Maybe everyone's afraid of going to jail five years down the road when there's a new administration, right?
But, you know, as far as the CIA and this whole thing goes, I think it's a matter of keeping options on the table.
I think it's a matter of keeping options on the table.
If you want to make a case for regime change, you can always just say, hey, our CIA and Pentagon train guys came under attack by Assad forces.
So we're going to hit them now.
I mean, I think a lot of this is partly about keeping options on the table.
As Hillary famously said, keep skin in the game.
Of course, it's not her skin, is it?
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And I guess now I've got to let you go so that you can race over to CNN International and watch Christian Amanpour interviewing Samantha Power about how the dastardly Russians are trying to kill all of our al-Qaeda friends in Syria and they must cease and desist immediately.
Here we go.
Exactly.
America, the state of the American empire in September of 2015.
Take note, everybody.
Thanks very much for your time on the show again, Brad.
It's great to talk to you, man.
All right.
Enjoyed it.
Appreciate it, Scott.
Great work here.
All right, y'all.
That is Brad Hoff.
He's at LevantReport.com, an American veteran and lived in Syria for a while.
ISIS leader Omar al-Shashani fought under U.S. umbrella as late as 2013.
A follow-up to Mitch Prothero's great reporting in McClatchy this week about how he was originally trained by American special forces in Georgia in the first place.
Hey, Al.
Scott Horton here.
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Hey, Al, guess what?
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