The Raw Story

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

Never forget: The head of the Islamic State does not exist

Having noted that voter angst has been riled, propagandized, and fear-mongered to the point at which the most pressing priority for Congress is to 'fix' terrorism, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that we discover - deep down in the archives - that giving the public someone to 'hate' as opposed to something may have been an entire fiction. As The New York Times exposed in 2007, Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, the titular head of the Islamic State, according to Brigadier General Kevin Bergner - the chief American military spokesman at the time - never existed .

For more than a year, the leader of one the most notorious insurgent groups in Iraq was said to be a mysterious Iraqi named Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi.

As the titular head of the Islamic State in Iraq, an organization publicly backed by Al Qaeda, Baghdadi issued a steady stream of incendiary pronouncements. Despite claims by Iraqi officials that he had been killed in May, Baghdadi appeared to have persevered unscathed.

On Wednesday, a senior American military spokesman provided a new explanation for Baghdadi's ability to escape attack: He never existed.

Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, the chief American military spokesman, said the elusive Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor named Abu Adullah al-Naima.

The ruse, Bergner said, was devised by Abu Ayub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was trying to mask the dominant role that foreigners play in that insurgent organization.

The ploy was to invent Baghdadi, a figure whose very name establishes his Iraqi pedigree, install him as the head of a front organization called the Islamic State of Iraq and then arrange for Masri to swear allegiance to him. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, sought to reinforce the deception by referring to Baghdadi in his video and Internet statements.

The evidence for the American assertions, Bergner announced at a news briefing, was provided by an Iraqi insurgent: Khalid Abdul Fatah Daud Mahmud al-Mashadani, who was said to have been captured by American forces in Mosul on July 4.

According to Bergner, Mashadani is the most senior Iraqi operative in Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. He got his start in the Ansar al-Sunna insurgent group before joining Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia more than two years ago, and became the group's "media emir" for all of Iraq. Bergner said that Mashadani was also an intermediary between Masri in Iraq and bin Laden and Zawahiri, whom the Americans assert support and guide their Iraqi affiliate.

"Mashadani confirms that al-Masri and the foreign leaders with whom he surrounds himself, not Iraqis, made the operational decisions" for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Bergner said.

...

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and a Middle East expert, said that experts had long wondered whether Baghdadi actually existed. "There has been a question mark about this," he said.

Nonetheless, Riedel suggested that the disclosures made Wednesday might not be the final word on Baghdadi and the leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Even Mashadani's assertions,Riedel said, might be a cover story to protect a leader who does in fact exist.

"First, they say we have killed him," Riedel said, referring to the statements by some Iraqi government officials. "Then we heard him after his death and now they are saying he never existed. That suggests that our intelligence on Al Qaeda in Iraq is not what we want it to be."

American military spokesmen insist they have gotten to the truth on Baghdadi.Mashadani, they say, provided his account because he resented the role of foreign leaders in Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. They say he has not repudiated the organization.

Read more here...

* * *

So he was a ghost back then.... is he a ghost again, a propaganda test-tube baby designed purely to put a face on ISIS and the biggest bogeyman of the current global anti-terrorist mania, so necessary to boost global QE in lieu of a world war (for now)?

It's certainly easier for an average joe to 'hate' a demonic leader than an amorphous 'thing' called 'Radical Islam' - just ask President Obama.

Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://bit.ly/1xcsdoI.

© Reuters

Netanyahu and Hollande attend a ceremony at the Paris Grand Synagogue to the victims of the Paris attacks this week.

Maariv today published an astonishing story. Anyone reading this blog is used to the brutishness of the Shin Bet. But usually it's reserved for Palestinians, Arab journalists, and air travelers with Arab "racial" profiles. We would never expect it to be meted out to the elected leader of a country that is an Israeli ally.

On the day of the memorial service for those slain in the kosher supermarket attack, Prime Minister Manuel Valls sought to take his seat in the synagogue with the President, Francois Hollande and Israel's leader, Bibi Netanyahu. As he approached his seat, his path was blocked by a Shin Bet agent who refused to allow him to pass until Netanyahu had taken his own seat. According to Valls, the agent grabbed his arm and forced him to wait until the Israeli had seated himself.

Valls shouted at him in French and English:

You don't make the rules here. You provide security for the prime minister of Israel, that is all.

The Israeli ambassador to France apologized for the encounter. There can be no doubt that this was a deliberate affront to France's political leadership. Hollande and Valls made clear during Netanyahu visit that he wasn't wanted in the country. Bibi isn't one to suffer insults gladly. So either he, his official lackeys, or the Shin Bet itself took it upon itself to take Valls down a peg or two. It seems to me this is an extremely dangerous game. It also seems to me this is a game played by very desperate people who share no concern for the overall long term interests of their country. But who are rather motivated by personal needs and emotions.

In a separate encounter, a leader of the French Jewish community recounted a meeting Netanyahu held with the communal leadership. Those attending were "deeply insulted" by the prime minister's comparison of their behavior to those of the Spanish Jews in 1492 "who felt good in Spain but who erred" in not leaving when they had the chance.

You may recall that Netanyahu's father, Ben Zion, was a scholar of medieval Spanish Jewry. Maariv notes that in the meeting Bibi summoned his father's authority to support the insult he offered the French leadership. I've said here before that Bibi has none of the supposed erudition of his father regarding Jewish history. Where would he have had Spanish Jews go? To the Holy Land? As it was, Spanish Jews found refuge in many places from Amsterdam to Brazil to New Amsterdam. But to say that in the 15th century, Spanish Jewry should've known that the were doomed if they remained in Spain, seems the height of foolishness.

If we draw the historical analogy further, Bibi seems to be saying that France is headed for the same sort of religious takeover that Catholics engineered in 15th century Spain. Except that this time, it will be Islamists taking over. Further, Bibi infers that the Islamist hordes who do take over France will expel all French Jews after they do. Therefore, they should escape now to Israel, their homeland, while there's still time. I think most reasonable people can see how ludicrous this logic is. It's the product of a distorted view of reality induced by the thinking that characterized Ben Zion Netanyahu, Zeev Jabotinsky's personal secretary.

Netanyahu's tongue-lashing is little different (in fact it's pretty much the same) as blaming Polish and Russian Jews for not foreseeing Hitler's rise and the Holocaust, and escaping while they still had time. This is a shameful act of blaming the victims. It's easy to read history with 20/20 hindsight, but much harder when you are in the middle of such great tragedy. As someone who's known Holocaust survivors and written an oral history of an Auschwitz survivor, I make it a point never to judge the actions of those facing such life and death dilemmas. It takes a cold, cruel, heartless man to do so. And Bibi Netanyahu is just such a one.

Stories like this presage a hardening of the world's attitude toward Israel. When asked politely to stay home, Netanyahu defied his French hosts. What country in the world will want to welcome him after this? Now, an act of petty vengeance by a Shin Bet goon has strengthened the process of isolation represented by BDS.

Bibi had already been warned that defying Hollande's wish would sour bi-lateral relations for the rest of Bibi's premiership. Now, Israel can expect a French vote in the UNSC in favor of Palestinian statehood.

Joseph P Farrell

As you can tell, this week we've been primarily focused on geopolitics and financial news (as distinct from last week's focus on some technological issues and their implications). And this has certainly been a week of geopolitical news, all of them summing to the same thing: Mr. Putin is battening down the hatches for a long-term contest with the West and with the USA in particular.

The first indicator is a highly significant one, as Russia's State Duma is considering legislation banning "undesirable foreign groups":

Duma moves to outlaw 'undesirable' foreign groups

There are two points to note here. The first is that the legislation is being sponsored by members of parties other than Mr. Putin's:

"The head of the committee, MP Vladimir Pligin (United Russia) told the TASS news agency that it would recommend the legislature hold the first hearing on the motion on January 20.

"The initiative, dubbed by the mass media as the "Undesirable Groups Bill" was drafted in late November last year by two opposition lawmakers, Aleksandr Tarnavskiy from the leftist party Fair Russia and Anton Ishchenko of the nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia.

"',' MP Tarnavskiy said as he presented the bill to the parliamentary committee. 'The main objective of the motion is to demonstrate the existence of groups that are unfriendly to Russia,' he added."(Emphases italics in the original)

The real source of concern here is this:

"The main criteria for putting an organization, which can be a foreign or international NGO as well as a company on the list is, "," or "."

It doesn't take much to realize that the real target here is to prevent the operation, within the Russian Federation, of NGOs or Non-Government Institutions, i.e., the fronts behind which the USA and the west have sponsored the various "color revolutions" and meddled in the internal politics of other sovereign nations, the most recent example of which is, of course, the Ukraine. What Russia is doing is simply removing the ability and opportunity for such organizations to meddle in the internal affairs of Russia and to sponsor "regime change" in that country. There's more about what this portends, but that will have to wait for my high octane speculation, which we'll get to in a moment.

But in order to see what those high octane speculations involve, one must next look at this story, a continuation of a story we blogged about last year, and which has now come home to roost:

MasterCard Partners with Central Bank to Operate in Russia

You'll note one important component of this cooperation is not only that Masercard base its Russian clearing operations in Russia, but that it use and software in its operations:

"The NSPC mandates that MasterCard will have to team up with Russia's Central Bank locally, maintain a domestic processing center in the country and use Russian technology for its operations. Meanwhile, the implementation deadline for switching to a local partner for payment processing was postponed to Mar 2015 from Oct 2014. While minimal effect is anticipated on MasterCard's top line in 2014, amendments in Russian payments laws are likely to weigh on the company's revenues in 2015."

I'll leave it to the reader to work out all the implications of that, and the reasons behind it, for they directly influence today's high octane speculations, which in turn concern this third article from our friends at

Oil Price Blowback: Is Putin Creating A New World Order?

is indeed asking the right question: Is Mr. Putin Creating a New World Order? At the minimum, as we've been arguing here - and as many other websites and bloggers have been arguing - Mr. Putin at the very minimum means to have a say and influence in whatever world order may emerge in the coming decades, and that the American "neo-cons'" version of a unipolar world order (a euphemism for hegemony) is simply out of the question, a sentiment which has played well in Beijing, New Delhi, and Brasilia. We've seen the recent responses of Russia to the West's sanctions: (1) an invitation to Europe to abandon its relationship with Washington and to join a wider Eurasian "customs union," (2) de-coupling from the dollar and selling Russia's dollar reserves, and (3) a reminder to Europe where the energy side of its bread is buttered, with the recent stoppage of energy shipments through the Ukraine.

Catherine Austin Fitts

But, in my opinion, there's a "flip side" to this that few analysts in the West "get," and it was brought home to me in a major way by a comment made to me by former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts, and with it, my high octane speculation of the day: Consider things from Mr. Putin's point of view for a moment (and this is a point I've made before on this site). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it looked, for a few years, as if Russia would become the showcase of the "post-modern" western state, as oligarchs moved to plunder the Russian economy for far-off western masters under the Yeltsin regime. Then in stepped Mr. Putin, who put a stop to it (More or less, and that, in any case, is the short "Cliff notes" version). And the instrumentality was to reassert a strong Russian as a counterbalance to the corporate interests. Or, to put it in terms that make globaloney-ists go purple with apoplexy, Mr. Putin reasserted the concept of national sovereignty (and with it cultural identity), and has been using the vocabulary and even the words "sovereign nations" in his talks and remarks. Add to this a circumstances that Russians know all too well: the imposition of Marxism on Russia largely by the West, through the Kaiser's smuggling of Lenin into Russia during World War One, to American financing of Leon Trotsky's return, at approximately the same time. Marxism, in other words, was a Western import, an attempt by the high financial corporatists and syndicalists of the west to force Russia and its Orthodox culture into a western "post-modernist" secular mold.

Thus, what Mr. Putin's Russia represents is, in a certain sense, (here comes my high octane speculation) something and therefore, in a wider historical sense, of the West and its elites, stuck as they are in the globalist dogma that the nation state is a thing of the past, and the trans-national corporation is the wave of the future, for Russia is in a kind of "post-post modernist This highlights Mr. Putin's dilemma, for he represents a sovereign state, trying to negotiate with "states" in the west that have, in effect, lost much of their sovereignty and whose governments represented hollowed out institutions captive to a variety of high financial and and trans-national corporate interests, and largely unresponsive to their own culture, institutions, and people, a fact that is perhaps reflected in Mr. Putin's oft-used deliberate choice of words, "our partners in the West," and, you'll note, curiously and simultaneously the use of those words "sovereign nations" in his references to the West, as if describing not diplomatic relations, but corporate ones. This has put Russia in the odd position of being able to negotiate with other nations whose state institutions remain rather strong (China for instance), while simultaneously attempting to speak directly to the growing cynicism in the West's populations while conducting "diplomacy" with governments that are much less sovereign than the corporations propping them up. In short, in those upcoming "peace talks" about the Ukraine, Mr. Putin - unlike Frau Merkel or M. Hollande - represents a real state, whereas his western counterparts are merely emissaries of various financial factions.

Mr. Putin's rhetoric has perhaps escaped this type of analysis in the past, but, if I'm correct, we'll see more rhetorical signals from him and his advisers this year along these lines, and Russia will continue to assert, and reassert, its national and cultural sovereignty, vis-a-vis the NGOs and corporations of the West.

In short, it's going to be an interesting year.

A peculiar creature with 'rodent-like teeth' has washed up on a North Devon beach.

Delphine Sutherland found the dead fish while walking at Woolacombe and posted a photo of it on Facebook to try to find out what it was.

Ilfracombe Aquarium director Lawrence Raybone said it looked like a trigger fish, typically found around the coasts of Spain and France.

He said: "It's more commonly found by sea anglers during the summer months while this shoaling animal is heading north on its migration route.

"It has a powerful set of jaws with rodent-like teeth which it uses to great effect breaking the shells of crab and urchins."

The trigger fish owes its name to its long frontal spine to the dorsal fin locking in an upright position a bit like the safety-catch of a trigger.

This mechanism is used to wedge itself into rock crevices for safety and to express aggression or interest in a mate.

A peculiar creature with 'rodent-like teeth' has washed up on a North Devon beach.

Delphine Sutherland found the dead fish while walking at Woolacombe and posted a photo of it on Facebook to try to find out what it was.

Ilfracombe Aquarium director Lawrence Raybone said it looked like a trigger fish, typically found around the coasts of Spain and France.

He said: "It's more commonly found by sea anglers during the summer months while this shoaling animal is heading north on its migration route.

"It has a powerful set of jaws with rodent-like teeth which it uses to great effect breaking the shells of crab and urchins."

The trigger fish owes its name to its long frontal spine to the dorsal fin locking in an upright position a bit like the safety-catch of a trigger.

This mechanism is used to wedge itself into rock crevices for safety and to express aggression or interest in a mate.

A new rug that greeted visitors to one Florida sheriff's office has been pulled up after it was discovered that the standard phrase "In God We Trust" had been mistakenly rendered as "In Dog We Trust."

The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office rug was removed today after the typo wasspotted--nearly three weeks after the floor covering was received from manufacturer American Floor Mats. The Maryland

firm will replace the $500 rug with a typo-free model, as first reported by WFTS.

As seen above, the rug features a replica of the sheriff's logo. A second green rug at the Largo headquarters has "God" spelled correctly.

Herd of animals take over a road in Japan

Drivers in Japan had their daily commute interrupted - when a herd of deer took over the road.

The group of animals, who had escaped from the nearby wildlife park, decided to bed down for the night in the middle of a busy street.

Taking over one lane of the road, as well as the pavement and some patches of grass in the area, the deer seem unconcerned as the traffic advances towards them, and firmly stand (or lie on) their ground.

But for road users in this area, it isn't a particularly odd phenomenon, because the animals take over this section of the highway every year.

[embedded content]

According to the YouTube user, who uploaded the six and a half minute clip, the deer make the annual trip out of the Nara Wildlife Park because it is cooler to rest by the roadside.

The rogue animals can often be seen stalling traffic in late July, when temperatures in the city of Nara have been known to reach 35 degrees celsius.

The Raw Story

Focused on providing independent journalism.

Kiev orders crackdown on Russian TV channels

What I did after police killed my son

Emerging solar plants scorch birds in mid-air

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

Never forget: The head of the Islamic State does not exist

Nowhere to go but down: Netanyahu insults French Jews after Shin Bet manhandles French PM

Joseph P Farrell: Speculation on Putin's priorities and why

Weird fish with 'rodent-like teeth' found dead on Woolacombe beach, UK

Weird fsh with 'rodent-like teeth' found dead on Woolacombe beach, UK

Florida sheriff's new rug removed for embarrassing typo

Herd of deer take over a road after escaping from wildlife park in Japan

Search

Recent Posts

Popular