The Rich Get Rich While the Poor go to Prison

When analyzing the issues of police brutality in America and the Black Lives Matter movement, a lot of the most important aspects of the situation are rarely talked about.

Firstly, we have to ask how the criminal justice system operates and how it relates to power and inequality. The best and most detailed analysis of this that I have found is The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison by Jeffrey Reiman.

It argues that the justice system does not function by identifying and pursuing the most harmful and threatening criminal behavior within society, but instead maintains a laser-like focus on punishing the harmful acts of the poor while allowing and enabling the overwhelmingly more harmful acts of the rich to continue, things such as companies that release toxic chemicals into the air and workers who get killed because of dishonest regulatory practices, or, for instance, when Wall Street destroys the economy and millions of people lose their homes, jobs, and savings… that little thing.

Instead of reflecting the actual threats to society our system acts as a sort of carnival mirror which magnifies the threat of street crime while minimizing that of the much more dangerous corporate crime. At the same time in a vastly disproportionate way it incarcerate the impoverished and disenfranchised for things that all classes engage in, like non-violent drug use.

While doing this, the system has had no discernible success at lowering crime rates, the rates of crime today being roughly equivalent as those of the ’60s (before the war on drugs and our addiction to mass incarceration began).

So what we’re talking about is a system that arbitrarily targets the poor and fails to protect citizens from societies most serious dangers. This of course doesn’t imply that a lot of the criminals in jail aren’t actually bad people who deserve to be separated from society, a lot of them are, but this strategy of zero tolerance is not effective in any recognizable way at lessening the problem of crime. Instead it maintains power relations and supports the interests of one class against the others.

Reiman describes this as what he calls a “Pyrrhic defeat.” A Pyrrhic victory describes a military victory which is so costly in terms of troops and money that it is considered a defeat. The Pyrrhic defeat theory holds that the failure of the justice system yields such positive benefits to those in positions of power that it amounts to a success. In order to maintain this situation, those in power and the dominant media institutions propagate a narrative that the real threat to Americans comes from law-breaking poor minorities, not those at the top. This unrealistic picture of the world then leads Americans to demand harsher “tough on crime” policies aimed primarily at the lower classes. Instead of mitigating crime rates, this kind of system instead maintains a continual criminal underclass while as well even aiding the proliferation of crime. (Reiman describes a study in which students were asked to devise a system from scratch that would further crime rather than reduce it. The characteristics they described, things like arbitrary arrests for non-violent recreational activities – marijuana use – and making it virtually impossible to reenter society after conviction, were almost exact replicas of the way our system currently functions.)

The inability of the criminal justice system to adequately address the problem of crime was understood decades ago. In 1967 President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice observed that the system was “not designed to eliminate the conditions in which most crime breeds.” It noted that “crime flourishes where the conditions of life are the worst”, and thus what needs to be done is “to eliminate slums and ghettos, to improve education, to provide jobs, to make sure that every American is given the opportunities and freedoms that will enable him to assume his responsibilities.” (Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1967, p. 279)

Criminal justice in America instead is based upon the idea of individual guilt and punishment, when in reality criminal behavior is a result of the larger structural system around us and all of the various pressures and incentives that exist within it. Crime doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but is a product of environmental forces and the ways in which we are likely to respond to them. For instance, a 1992 study found a strong correlation between unemployment and crime. (Merva & Fowles, Effects of Diminished Economic Opportunities on Social Stress, Economic Policy Institute, 1992)

Coming back to police brutality however, the problem primarily stems from the changes to the economy that began in the ’70s.

At that time financialization began to take hold and the US industrial sector was gutted as corporations began extensively outsourcing production to factories akin to sweat-shops in places like China and Vietnam. This created an entire class of mostly poor and unemployed people without opportunities for work, and it effected the black and Hispanic populations the worst.

Instead of dealing with the “conditions in which crime breeds” decision-makers decided to use police and to build prisons. This “superfluous population” of people that capitalism had no use for (this was how those at the top of the establishment viewed them) were dealt with through mass incarceration. There is extensive documentation, such as in Christian Parenti’s Lockdown America, on the way in which “zero-tolerance” and “3 strike” policies and harsh police tactics swept these people up into the criminal justice system, often times utilizing massive brutality and violations of rights and freedoms while making arrests based on trumped up charges and giving extraordinary sentence lengths way out of proportion with the crime committed. (In one of these such cases a man with 2 decade-and-a-half old charges on his record was sentenced to life in prison after stealing a pair of socks worth $2.50.)

The police resembled an occupying force utilized against the poor that served as a tool of social control and repression.

This all was mainly targeted against black people, who on the whole have been kept to the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder due to a historical pattern of discrimination. The cops largely adopted a racist ideology and targeted people based on their skin color, even though this kind of criminal behavior, mainly 1-on-1 offenses like theft and assaults, are related to deprivation and poverty, not race. Impoverished white communities have the same persistence of crime that impoverished black communities have.

The mechanism for accomplishing all of this was drugs.

H.R. Halderman, one of Nixon’s aides, said that “[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” (Christian Parenti, Lockdown America, p. 3)

That system was the war on drugs, which openly was aimed at low level drug users and dealers (how could anyone have taken them seriously with a strategy like that?) which massively incarcerated the disenfranchised classes for something that all classes participate in nearly equally. African-Americans use and sell drugs at about the same rates as whites. Those who filled the massive prison population boom were mainly drug offenders from poor, minority backgrounds.

Recently another Nixon insider, John Ehrlichman, explained the reasoning behind all of this: “You want to know what this was really about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

This is what Michelle Alexander, a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer and legal scholar, is talking about when she describes the New Jim Crow, a system of criminalization which puts millions of already marginalized people into a “permanent second-class citizenship” status through their criminal records. Once branded as criminal, even for things like petty offenses, the authorities are then able to further intrude upon people’s lives and violate rights and freedoms, which in turn leads to the branding of more serious criminal labels which furthers the legal ability to violate rights even more.

The initial stage of this process usually begins at an extremely young age, children are arrested in grade school for things like “insubordination” or talking back to teachers.

In The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, Reiman describes that when predominately poor and minority children get caught by police for a petty offense, they are more likely to be treated as though they need to be punished and taught a lesson. When children at the top of the socioeconomic ladder get caught for similar offenses, they are more likely to be treated as though they made a mistake and deserve a second chance.

In our society we treat poor minorities as though they are criminals who need to be punished while we treat the privileged as though they are people with problems that are in need of help.

Alexander describes in one of her lectures how she was approached by a young black man who presented her with evidence of systematic police brutality in his community. Alexander, who had dedicated her career to social justice cases, thought the evidence highly convincing, but once she learned that the man was a convicted criminal she turned him down. The reason why is that in the courts a criminal’s word is basically good for nothing, especially when going up against officers of the state. She explains how her epiphany on this issue occurred when the boy became furious at her, stating that she was no “different from them” and challenging her to find one kid in his neighborhood who they hadn’t “got to yet.”

She describes how the stories of those principally abused and oppressed by the police are not being heard “because they have been branded criminals, branded felons, and we, as a nation, have decided that they are unworthy of our care and concern.”

She describes how from then on she began her journey, listening to the countless stories of people who have been cycling in and out of prison while conducting extensive amounts of research in order to try and understand what was really going on, to find out why it was true that she hadn’t been able to find a young black man in that neighborhood who the police hadn’t “got to yet.”

Her conclusions were that there exists an underprivileged class of people that are members of what she describes as a criminal “caste system,” which makes things like higher education, employment, housing and public assistance virtually unobtainable.

The result of all of this, as Chris Hedges points out, is that police officers are now continually carrying out “random acts of legalized murder against poor people of color not because they are racist, although they may be, or even because they are rogue cops, but because impoverished urban communities have evolved into miniature police states.” The reality for people living in these miniature police states is that “police can stop citizens at will, question and arrest them without probable cause, kick down doors in the middle of the night on the basis of warrants for nonviolent offenses, carry out wholesale surveillance, confiscate property and money and hold people—some of them innocent—in county jails for years before forcing them to accept plea agreements that send them to prison for decades. They can also, largely with impunity, murder them.”

Therefore, any minor change like body cameras and increased convictions for brutality, though necessary and needed, ultimately will not solve the underlying causes from which the problem stems and thus will not reform the system. Certainly things like firing this or that individual or advocating that what needs to be done is to appoint “the good cops” will fail as well.

The problem is that we are faced with an institutional system set up to protect the powerful and punish the poor, one which enacts policies and economic restructuring that massively redistributes wealth to a privileged minority and then responds to the problems which arise from those brutalized by these policies with mass incarceration and police repression. Criminal law brandishes a whole class of people into a status of second-class citizenship, and social problems which necessitate education and opportunities are dealt with through violence. All while the major criminals in corporate boardrooms are free to continue harming society as they please while generating massive profits. Highly centralized economic power then translates into political power, and the society is further constructed in the interests of the few against the well being of the majority.

If we do not fundamentally change the justice system into one that handles crime based on its relative threat to society irrespective of class and ethnicity, while as well democratizing the political and economic systems away from rule by plutocracy, police will continue killing black people and the poor, and they will continue to get away with it.

The US Admits it Supports al-Qaeda, But Don't Worry Because it's Okay

According to the Pentagon, Aleppo is "primarily held" by al-Qaeda.  They argue that the rebels the CIA supports there are allies of al-Qaeda.  The CIA, however, "rejects that claim, saying alliancess of convenience in the face of a mounting Russian-led offensive have created marriages of battlefield necessity, not ideology."

Only the CIA doesnt "reject that claim", they don't deny the fact that the rebels they back are in alliance with al-Qaeda, they admit that it is true and then go on and try to justify the crime of supporting international terrorism.

The US is, by their own admission, supporting one of the most horrific terrorist groups in the world through their rebel proxies.  Noting this fact only a few months ago would have been rejected outright as some kind of conspiracy theory lunacy, yet now that they are unable to hide it anymore the propaganda narrative has changed.  Instead of denying it they admit it, and say the rebels do work with al-Qaeda only they really really don't want to, and so its okay.  The problem however is that every single claim made in this argument is false.

They claim that the collusions are "alliances of convenience", except that when the Cessation of Hostilities was agreed upon it was the "moderate" FSA commanders who literally begged the US and Russia to include al-Qaeda in the ceasefire and protect them from being targeted.  They referred to the group as their "brothers" and as an "honorable faction."  A few months ago an al-Qaeda commander was filmed presenting a gift to an FSA officer stating that "al-Qaeda and the FSA are one" while thanking him for using US-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles in support of al-Qaeda on the battlefield.  A few years ago the commander who recieved the largest amount of US aid was interviewed on TV and said al-Qaeda are the "brothers" of the FSA, and that "al-Qaeda does not exhibit any behavior that is different from the FSA" and "our relationship" with the extremists is "good."

This is the reality of the relationship, yet when the rebels are instructed by their British government propaganda arm (the US and UK have admitted to running a PR shop for the FSA in order to clean up their image) they tell the media that they really don't want to be working with al-Qaeda, the media then accept this as fact, and the public are shielded from the inconvenient reality.

Secondly the CIA claims that they themselves do not want the rebels to be working with al-Qaeda, except that it was the US who directly TOLD the rebels to work with them and to subordinate themselves under an al-Qaeda dominated front.  When the rebels first conquered Aleppo in 2015, it was revealed in Foreign Policy that the US-led operations rooms had instructed the rebels to fight alongside al-Qaeda and operate under their command.

Back in 2014 one of the CIA-backed rebel commanders revealed to The Independent that he had been instructed by "those who support us", i.e. the US and its allies, to send weapons to the jihadi groups.  "When they tell us to do this, we do it," he said.

Thirdly it's claimed that the alliances are a response to the Russian intervention, however as just described the rebels have been working with al-Qaeda long before the Russians ever started bombing.

After this is pointed out it is then argued that the alliances are the result of Assad and his strategy of "bombing the moderates," yet this argument instantly collapses upon examination.  The US instigated a proxy insurgency from abroad that has supported some of the world's most viscous terrorists, and Syria has every right to defend itself against this attack.  Syria has always fought against al-Qaeda and ISIS and their US-backed affiliates, the "bombing the moderates" line is an attempt to obscure this fact.  Further they have every right to attack the affiliates of al-Qaeda, a UN Security Council resolution was reached (that the US agreed to) which calls on all countries to work to eliminate al-Qaeda, ISIS, "and all affiliated groups."  What sane and rational person would argue against fighting the affiliates of al-Qaeda?

Fifthly it is argued that these alliances are not a reflection of shared ideology, except it has been widely reported years back that there "isn't a secular group in sight" in Syria, the foremost academic experts on the country have reported that nearly all of the rebels are exclusively Sunni Muslim and that they all desire some from of an Islamic state, meaning one consisting of reactionary Shariah law.

And lastly it's argued that these alliances are a result of "battlefield necessity."  Here, however, I actually agree.

Vice president Biden admitted that "there are no moderates" because "the moderates are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers," while Obama explained that these shopkeepers would never be an effective fighting force, and so there was no "clean way" to carry out their policy of overthrowing the government in Syria.  Thus the need to work with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey in supporting the most violent extremist elements.  The strategy is one of utilizing the radical jihadis as a means of bringing the Syrian government to its knees and to force it to comply with US demands.  If they want to topple Assad, then they have to support the most effective forces on the battlefield which are the extremists.  This, however, is not an argument for supporting extremists, it is an argument against it.

Despite the fact that all of the claims in this argument are false, all of this really doesn't matter.  The US admits to supporting al-Qaeda through their proxies.  Only the vilest of monsters would argue "yes, we are supporting terrorists, but...."

The US and its allies instigated an insurgency by proxy and have supported the worst terrorists groups in the process because it was beneficial to their goals of imperialism.  They then go on to blame Assad and Russia for what they are doing.

When the US and its allies support terror groups because it helps them destroy Syria, it's their fault, and only the most deranged of psychopaths would argue otherwise.

The Terror Attack in Nice

Perhaps one of the most striking features of the attack in Nice are not what occurred in France, but instead how the reaction exemplifies the selective humanity that we exhibit depending on where terrorism occurs. 

The public, politicians, and the media all rightfully displayed outrage over the string of attacks that have been plaguing France over the past 18 months, as well as the recent Orlando shooting in the US, yet the level of outrage and media coverage never reaches the same levels when terrorism strikes other parts of the world, in particular the Middle East. 

This in turn breeds a skewed perception in the West that it is a “battle of civilizations” that is being fought.  It obscures by omission the fact that most of the terrorism committed by groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS is perpetuated against other Arabs in Muslim-majority countries.  This flawed perception then leads to the painting of all Muslim’s as terrorists, fueling the ignorant racism of calls by the likes of Donald Trump to discriminate against them, completely neglecting the fact that it is Muslims and Arabs that are on the forefront of this battle sacrificing their lives to rid the world of the jihadis.  It paints a picture in Western minds that the cause of all of this is an ethereal religious ideology, or that this is a problem inherent in Arab and Muslim “blood, in their DNA”, when in reality the extremism is mainly an outgrowth of the practical imperialism that is arming, training, and financially supporting the terror groups for purposes of geopolitical expansion, the main driver of which being the United States.

For example, not many spoke out when just last week nearly 300 were killed in Baghdad following the detonation of a truck bomb for which ISIS claimed responsibility.  It was the deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital in years, yet exactly what were the circumstances that led ISIS to thrive there?

When ISIS declared its existence in Syria in 2014, it had long been known that the group would push back into its old pockets of support in the cities of Mosul and Ramadi.

2 years prior in 2012, a vetted Intelligence Information Report of the DIA was circulated throughout the Obama administration.  It predicted the rise of ISIS given the support from “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey” to a Syrian opposition dominated by “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI (Al-Qaeda in Iraq).”  It predicted that the continued empowerment of these forces would cause deterioration, which would have “dire consequences on the Iraqi situation”, thus precipitating “the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria.”

Given this information, the US and its allies increased their support for the Syrian opposition throughout the next two years.  Indeed, it was our “major Arab allies” that funded the rise of the Islamic State. 

This wasn’t a secret however, the Saudi Foreign Minister himself told John Kerry that the Islamic State was a Saudi creation, stating to him that “Daesh [Isis] is our [Sunni] response to your support for the Da’wa” — the Tehran-aligned Shia Islamist ruling party of Iraq. 

During this time the US enjoyed an intimate relationship with the Saudi’s vis-à-vis their mutual Syria policy, the Saudi’s provided the weapons and petrodollars for the rebels in exchange for “a seat at the table” and to say “what the agenda is going to be.”  That agenda, according to the 2012 DIA report, was “the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria” which was “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want” given their desire “to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion” from Iran and into Iraq. 

This was confirmed by then head of the DIA, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who stated that it had been a “willful decision” for the administration to ignore the intelligence warnings of an impending Islamic State and to instead continue on with their policy regardless.

This all in turn led to a situation in 2014 in which ISIS was mobilizing as a potent force, and began to make its push into Iraq.

This imminent push was well known to US intelligence. 

According to high level officials, the US “had significant intelligence about the pending Islamic State offensive… For the US military, it was an open secret at the time… It surprised no one.”

In a Senate testimony in 2014 DIA director Flynn warned that “the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014.”

The US though, did nothing.

According to the WSJ, “the failure to confront ISIS sooner wasn't an intelligence failure. It was a failure by policy makers to act on events that were becoming so obvious that the Iraqis were asking for American help for months before Mosul fell. Mr. Obama declined to offer more than token assistance.”

Yet there is no need to speculate on why nothing was done, Obama told us himself. 

The strategy was to utilize the ISIS attack as a means to pressure the Iraqi Prime Minister, in an effort to lead to his ouster.  The reason “that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in,” Obama explained, was because “that would have taken the pressure off of Maliki.”

Not long after Maliki stepped down, and Abadi took his place.  ISIS, however, remained a potent force in Iraq for years to come, paving the way for the attacks last week, killing upwards of 300, unfortunately only one among many others.

Turning back to France, the continual occurrence of terrorist activity is intimately tied in with involvement in the Syria crisis.

By 2012 France had “emerged as the most prominent backer of Syria's armed opposition" and was then "directly funding rebel groups… as part of a new push to oust the embattled Assad regime.”

This being only months after the DIA had warned “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI (Al-Qaeda in Iraq)” were “the major forces driving the insurgency.” 

And while France justified its involvement through talk of a “moderate opposition”, the CIA’s point-man, sent to the country throughout 2012 to meet with the rebels, saw for himself that “there were no moderates” there at that time.

It was France’s policy of attempting to oust Assad that directly led to the rise of extremist jihadis inside Syria and Iraq, yet the media establishment is criminally ignorant to these underlying geopolitical machinations. 

Former MI6 officer Alastair Crooke describes the situation as such: “the jihadification of the Syrian conflict had been a “willful” policy decision, and that since Al Qaeda and the ISIS embryo were the only movements capable of establishing such a Caliphate across Syria and Iraq, then it plainly followed that the U.S. administration, and its allies, tacitly accepted this outcome, in the interests of weakening, or of overthrowing, the Syrian state.” 

He notes that this strategy dates back to the Cold War, in which “setting the destruction of secular nationalism [was] its overwhelming priority,” and therefore, “America by default found itself compelled to be allied with the Gulf Kings and Emirs who traditionally have resorted to Sunni jihadism as the inoculation against democracy.”

This continued on into the Bush administration: “The 2003 war in Iraq had not brought about the pro-Israeli, pro-American regional bloc that had been foreseen by the neocons, but rather, it had stimulated a powerful “Shia Crescent” of resistance stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean,” causing the Sunni states to be “petrified of a Shiite resurgence”, and thus necessitating the creation of a Sunni proxy force that could rival Hezbollah and Iran, which found its realization in al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria.  

Indeed, Obama and Biden both admitted that they did not believe in the farce of arming “moderates”, Obama stating that “When you have a professional army that is well-armed and sponsored by two large states who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict, the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.” (Emphasis added)  Biden bluntly summarized: “there was no moderate middle because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers.”

And so “the answer as so often was to move to more covert means… by increasing the clandestine operations in support of the opposition including the jihadists.”

Yet this even goes a step further, with the French authorities tacitly allowing or even encouraging the flow of French nationals into Syria.

In 2013 Foreign Policy put out a story noting that upwards of 1,000 European nationals were travelling into Syria.  The headline read “Hundreds are joining the fight against Assad. Will they return as terrorists?” 

The French Interior Minister counted at least 140 French citizens making the sojourn, and while he admitted that “It is a ticking time bomb,” no actual concern or alarm was raised to do something about it.

“For the time being,” the Minister said, “there is no legal basis for arresting the European jihadists or barring them from leaving or entering France.”  He further justified the lack of action by stating that “The fighters in Syria are not fighting France or Europe; they are fighting against the Assad regime.  It’s not against French law to fight in a war, but it is a crime to participate in a terrorist organization."

Former counter-terrorism officer and Scotland Yard detective Charles Shoebridge explains the situation further: “For the first two of the last three years, countries such as the UK and France did little to stem the flow of their citizens to an already destabilised Syria and Libya, perhaps believing these jihadists would serve Western foreign policy objectives in attacking Gaddafi and Assad for example.”

“Only when domestic intelligence services began to warn of the dangers of blowback from such people, and when groups such as ISIS began over the last year to turn against the West in Iraq and Syria for example, was any real action taken to stop the flow of UK and French citizens to what, in effect, were largely western policy created terrorist recruiting and training grounds. By then, as Europe seems increasingly likely to experience, it was already too late.”

Yet action did not include halting Western involvement in the Syrian war, which created the threat of terrorism in the first place, nor did it consist of ending involvement with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, who are the principle supporters of the terrorist movements.

Instead, what was done was business-as-usual: a state of emergency, more lockdowns, infringements on civil liberties and freedoms, and more aggressive war-posturing which sees the threat of terrorism as something you can bomb away, while neglecting all of its true sources.

In a detailed analysis by Britain’s leading international security scholar, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed notes that President Hollande’s reactive declaration of war “We will continue striking those who attack us on our own soil” is not solely a reference to Syria but as well to France’s current military involvement against Islamists in North Africa.

“Over the last half decade, Islamist militant factions affiliated to both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda have dramatically expanded their foothold in North Africa,” Ahmed writes, “spurred by the vacuum left from the aborted NATO war on Libya.”

The military-security architecture in the region is led by the United States, under the jurisdiction of AFRICOM.

Yet Ahmed notes that “Intelligence documents… prove that… the US, British and French were well aware that Algerian military intelligence had played a double-game, covertly financing al-Qaeda affiliated militants as a mechanism to consolidate its domestic control, and project power abroad.”  This al-Qaeda threat spilled over into Mali, “But instead of cracking down hard on Algeria’s state-sponsorship of Islamist terror, the US and British turned a blind eye, and the French invaded Mali.”

The French now have a permanent military presence in Mali, first envisioned as a means to rollback the Islamist uprising yet which has instead “seen an intensification of Islamic violence,” and has transformed itself into “a semi-colonial arrangement,” which lends support to brutal government repression that only further exacerbates tensions in the region. 

Ahmed notes that “Ongoing secretive operations and draconian abuses, along with extensive support for repressive regimes, one of which – Algeria – directly sponsored some of the Islamist factions running riot across the region, serves to stoke local grievances, but does little to shut down the terror networks… The US-French support for the region’s repressive governments, in the name of counter-terrorism, stokes further resentment.”

Yet Dr. Ahmed also points out that in the same way local grievances in France are as well exacerbated by a similar approach of expanded state repression.  Arbitrary house searches, the targeting of Muslims based upon religious affiliation rather than actual evidence, the arbitrary and unjustified closing down of mosques, all serve to create an environment in which the French government has “trampled on the rights of hundreds of men, women and children, leaving them traumatised and stigmatised,” resulting in “already marginalised Muslim communities in France experiencing routine state abuses.”

What all of this does is strengthen al-Qaeda, ISIS, and all other extremist elements which depend upon the brutal repression of Muslims to give legitimacy to their propaganda.  Propaganda which states that the West is the enemy of all Muslims, that in Western countries they will only face repression, brutality, and abuse, and so therefore must join in the jihad against the Western enemy, or if not be branded as apostates and live under the torment of the Western regimes.

The more we respond to terror with further abuses and more wars, the more the engine that marginalizes disenfranchised populations will continue making them vulnerable to extremist manipulation.

The major sources of these events can be deduced and intelligent steps can be implemented to prevent against their occurrence, yet the reaction taken after each continues to neglect logic and reasoning and perpetuates actions that exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the problem.  At the center of these follies is the persistent prioritization of acquisitions of power, imperialism, and resource domination that sideline concerns about terrorism.  Often these pursuits utilize the veiled pretext of “anti-terrorism” to justify their aims, aims which in fact support the very terror that they claim to oppose.  In Syria, the fight against ISIS is waged by supporting an al-Qaeda dominated insurgency, while in North Africa counter-terrorism serves as a pretext for military expansion, increasing the grievances which lead to more terror.  

The predictable result of all of this is more terror, more wars, more oppression, and more death. 

Only when pressure is put on those states, interests, and agencies to halt their selfish lusting for power will the terrorism ever truly cease.

Turkey's War Against the Kurds (Part 2): Power, Terrorism, and the Pretext for War

The Rejection of Peace

Turkeys war against its Kurdish population in its current iteration is as much about Erdogan and the Turkish power structures consolidating and maintaining their power as is their crackdown against journalism.  It has not been waged as a war to protect Turkish civilians from Kurdish insurgents but instead as a means to “protect” the oppressive power hierarchies that exist which seek to maintain the disparate position of the political-economic elite.  Instead of listening to the legitimate grievances of the Kurdish population, Erdogan and the AKP have chosen a strategy of violence, terrorism, and xenophobia in order to degrade the growing political power of the Kurds and to consolidate their rule and the continuation of their criminal policies.

The pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP) and the Kurdish military wing Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) have not been demanding independence, instead they have been calling for autonomy.  This in the face of Turkey’s political establishment historically treating the Kurds as second class citizens and denying them the right to be educated using their native language.  In response they have organized societal institutions in a radically different manner than the Turkish state, prioritizing the ideal of local, non-hierarchical forms of direct democracy.  In their view, as Professor of Economics at the University of Greenwich Mehmet Ugur explains, this is because “the nation state is now considered an anachronistic institution; and local democracy (including recognition and representation of distinct identities) has been embraced as a solution not only for the Kurdish question but also for democratisation in Turkey, Iraq and Syria.”

The Turkish government was never serious about officially devolving meaningful power for the Kurds to exercise over their locality, and has balked on agreeing to any kind of political peace negotiation.  This is due in part to the ideological currents running through the political establishment that as well permeate elite sectors of business and other societal institutions. 

This very nationalistic way of thinking sees the unilateral designs of the winning electoral party as encompassing ‘the national will,’ and thus equates dissent against them with ‘treason.’ 

Professor Ugur further explains: “The national will is expressed through elections that the party wins through multi-party competitions…  All other parties and civil-society organisations critical of the majority party can be demonised as collaborators of internal and external forces bent on preventing the nation from expressing its will. That is why AKP rhetoric has been based on ‘national will’ rather than democracy. That is also why AKP practice has been geared towards removal of legal, administrative and civil-societal checks and balances that could prevent the government from exercising absolutist majority rule. That is also why the AKP elite has gradually but increasingly deployed state power to equate dissent with treason.” 

In the logic of the AKP, “institutional checks and balances are dysfunctional because they make the exercise of the ‘national will’ cumbersome.”   

This way of thinking has a historical basis, which sees Turkey’s history in the context of 3 sets of beliefs: “(i) the Turks have established sixteen states, fifteen of which collapsed and the last one (the Republic of Turkey) must not face the same fate; (ii) the state is a father figure and the first duty of its sons (daughters are excluded explicitly or implicitly) is to obey the father’s authority; and (iii) the Turkish state is surrounded by all sort of enemies who work with internal collaborators to destabilise the country and prevent it from fulfilling its full potential.” 

Because of this, a relationship of patronage between business and state has emerged in which business interests and state-subservience co-exist: “Organised interests in Turkey (business organisations, their lobby groups, bosses of co-opted trades unions, most university rectors, the religious establishment, etc.) have read this script correctly. They presented their specific interests as true reflections of the national interest, which the Turkish state served in return for continued loyalty. That is why both sides have always been in tune when it comes to suppressing any opposition that questions the de jure or de facto rules of the game.”

Not surprising then is the Turkish governments unwillingness to devolve autonomy powers to the Kurds.  Indeed, it was Turkey that withdrew from a mostly farcical peace process just after the Kurdish HDP dealt a huge blow to Erdogan’s AK Party in the June 2015 elections. 

As the pro-Kurdish HDP gained enough votes to cross the threshold to enter parliament their victory forced the AKP to form a coalition government instead of exercising majority rule.  Their success was a sign of growing political influence as well as a symbol of the growing sympathy towards the Kurdish cause that had been building within the country.  Rising Kurdish political influence coupled with a threat to Erdogan’s own power was the driving impetus for Turkey to reignite a violent conflict with the Kurds.

The attacks against the Kurds were never a necessary exercise of state power, nor were they a reaction to a legitimate security threat.  Instead, like most groups stuck under the thumb of a much stronger and oppressive power, there has been a clear consensus for peace and resolution through political negotiation among a wide range of the Kurdish population.  That is why it was the Kurds who supported the peace process and it was Turkey who rejected it. 

The Dolmabahce Agreement was a political framework for resolving the Kurdish issue that was negotiated in February 2015 between the HDP and the Turkish government.  Its aim was to create a long-term roadmap for peace, and for a short time it appeared highly promising.  On February 28^th, 2015 Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Interior, and three deputies of the HDP announced the agreement in a joint-statement at Istanbul’s Dolmabahce Palace.  However, following the HDP victory and the AKP defeat in the July elections, Erdogan backtracked and rejected the deal. 

When rejecting the Agreement, Erdogan argued that it was invalid because it did not originate in parliament, and such an agreement only has legitimacy through congressional authority.  Therefore he told reporters on July 17^th that he did not “recognize the phrase ‘Dolmabahce Agreement,’” and effectively buried the deal.  The underlying reason was thus apparent: the inroads the HDP achieved within parliament increased their prospects of being able to use their rising political influence to push for peace through official parliamentary channels.  This, combined with the agreed-upon roadmap for peace that Dolmabahce represented, made the possibility of a peaceful settlement all too probable, and Erdogan had no intentions of sharing power.

The strategy was to reject negotiations and use violence and war to both attack the Kurds militarily while as well rallying votes throughout the country by exploiting nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments, thereby regaining a parliamentary majority.  A state of fear brought on by violence and conflict, coupled with the scapegoating of the problem on Kurdish ‘terrorists’, was used to rally the public under the AKP banner of “security” and “stability.”

As Professor Ugur explains it, “The political objective was to ensure the continuity of AKP rule, preferably with a large majority required to change the constitution and institute Mr Erdogan as a president with no checks and balances… Given these liabilities and the risk of failure to win a majority in the snap elections in November, the AKP government has initiated the process of state-orchestrated violence,” against the Kurds.

The strategy proved highly successful.

Strategy of Tension, Violence, and Aftermath

When ISIS began assaulting the Kurdish town of Kobani in 2014 Kurdish militias rose up to defend it, yet Turkey and Erdogan were silent. 

When the town looked poised to be defeated, Erdogan’s position of abandonment was made clear when he simply concluded of the situation that “Kobani is about to fall.” 

It was clear that he saw the ISIS attack as an opportunity rather than a threat.  The likely chance of being barbarically subjugated by ISIS was used to leverage demands from the Kurds. 

When the leader of the Kurdish PYD came to Turkish military intelligence to plead for aid, he was told he would only receive it if the Kurds surrendered: they were told they needed to give up their claim for self-determination, give up the localities they governed, and agree to a Turkish buffer zone in Syria.

The Kurds refused.

However, it is not as if Turkey had simply been sitting on the sidelines while refusing to intervene: they had been intimately involved in supporting the Islamic State, most ostensibly by securing their free passage into Syria through the Turkish border but as well through direct contact with ISIS members, coordinating arms transports, providing them a safe haven inside Turkish territory, and by transporting their fighters across the border into the warzone.  Reports would later surface that they were hospitalizing wounded ISIS fighters, and that sarin precursors were smuggled into ISIS-held areas with the help of Turkish authorities. (See part 1)  Just days prior to these events Vice President Biden told Harvard University students that it was the Turks, Saudis, and the UAE who had “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except that the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

Turkey was using the threat posed by the terrorist proxies they had fomented to force the Kurds to capitulate, and absent that capitulation would gladly see Kurdish towns overrun by their ISIS allies. 

As the ISIS proxies assaulted the Kurdish village, Turkish aircraft used the opportunity to bomb Kurdish positions inside Turkey for the first time in two years.  Yet an ISIS victory in Kobani would have been a humiliating defeat for the newly formed “anti-ISIS” coalition, and would have routed a key potential ally in the region for the Americans.  Therefore, under heavy pressure from the US, Erdogan finally allowed a contingent of Iraqi Peshmerga fighters to cross into Kobani from Turkish territory, and with further support from the US air force the Kurds were able to repel the ISIS attack.

Yet come June 2015, directly after the AKP’s electoral defeat, car bombs exploded at the Kobani border and convoys of cars carrying up to 40 ISIS fighters again attacked the Kurdish village simultaneously from three sides.

Kurdish witnesses said that the jihadis crossed into the city from the Turkish border, “If they entered from the Syrian side, they would have first come up many more important targets related to the YPG (the Kurdish militia), such as the main headquarters building where there are tens of fighters and leaders, or the local administration HQ,” a Kurdish activist said.  He noted that it was extremely unlikely they would have been able to pass by these obstacles unnoticed, and therefore the attack must have originated from Turkey.

If not in some way orchestrated or tacitly supported by Turkey, the attacks then represent a generous gift to Erdogan from old allies.

The situation escalated in July when a suicide bombing, of which ISIS claimed responsibility for, killed 32 and wounded another 104 in the Turkish town of Suruc.  The victims were pro-Kurdish university-aged students who were holding a press conference on their planned trip to help reconstruct Kobani.  It was theorized that the attacks could have been in retaliation for increasing measures that Turkey had been taking to clamp down on the jihadis.  Yet if so, how would attacking Turkey’s main domestic enemies constitute a retaliation?  Furthermore, the clamp down was only symbolic, used to portray the image that Turkey was getting tough on ISIS while not taking any substantial steps against them.  Following the events, in an interview with a Turkish journalist an ISIS commander denied there being any conflict with Turkey. 

The Kurdish PKK for their part blamed the Turkish authorities and accused them of collusion with ISIS.  In response they claimed responsibility for the killing of two Turkish police officers they said were responsible for the attacks.  Given the fact that just a year ago secret audio recordings were leaked of Turkey’s prime minister and the head of the secret service planning a false flag attack against Turkey as a pretext to invade Syria, there is a high probability that Turkey was in some way complicit.  

Further supporting this is the fact that the attacks were then utilized as the pretext for Turkey to enter into the “anti-ISIS” coalition, a guise used to initiate a war against the Kurds.

In the days that followed Turkey agreed to a deal with the US allowing them to use their Incirlik air base to fly bombing missions against the Islamic State.  The ostensible terms of the deal were that Turkey would let the US use their base, and Turkey would itself enter the fight against ISIS.  However, the actual terms were likely that the US had agreed in some form to Turkey’s longstanding demands to set up a “no-fly zone” inside Syria, which in practice was a plan to annex Syrian land and to attack Syria’s air-defenses.  Also very likely was that the US agreed to sell out the Kurds by acquiescing to the fact that Turkey’s attacks against ISIS would in actuality just be a cover for waging a war against them.

With the deal firmly in place the Turkish air force thus “initiated the process of state-orchestrated violence” by launching airstrikes against the Kurds and ISIS, except those against ISIS were only symbolic. 

The operation began on July 24^th, yet after July 25^th airstrikes were only continued against the Kurds, including those in Iraq and Syria.  In conjunction a large-scale domestic operation billed as an “anti-terror” crackdown was initiated.  Under the guise of going after ISIS Turkish police conducted massive raids against the Kurds and arrested over 1,000 people it labelled as terrorists.  According to one HDP member, of those arrested 80% were Kurdish.

Following this Turkey continued to relentlessly and murderously attack Kurdish villages.  They have imposed arbitrary, round-the-clock curfews of entire neighborhoods which the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights describes as a “massive restriction of some of the most fundamental human rights of a huge population” that does not “satisfy the criteria of proportionality and necessity in a democratic society.”  The assault includes artillery shelling in densely populated civilian areas, disconnection of water and electricity to entire towns, denying the victims access to medical treatment, preventing burials, and abusive and disproportionate force against any and all peaceful protests that dissent against the atrocities.  Turkish military operations “had killed hundreds of civilians, displaced hundreds of thousands and caused massive destruction in residential areas.”

The irony of all of this should not be lost: Turkey has been supporting the ISIS terror organization which has repeatedly attacked his domestic enemy, the Kurds.  Turkey has then used the terrorists as a justification to wage his own war against the Kurds, while further exploiting the terrorism and the instability as a means to gain political power for himself and his party.

On October 10, 2015 Turkey witnessed the deadliest terror attack ever in the country's modern history, carried out by two suspected Islamic State suicide bombers.  The attack effectively shepherded Erdogan and the AKP back into a parliamentary victory.  In the climate of fear that followed, couple with the violence and chaos from the war with the Kurds, Erdogan’s AKP made a resounding comeback in the elections the following month in November.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Erdogan’s AKP “regained sole control of Parliament as millions of voters who had been disillusioned with the party returned in force.”  “Pro-Kurdish parties lost significant ground” as “the AKP’s rise drained votes from the… HDP.”  Erdogan would now have “a clear mandate to press ahead with the military campaign against Kurdish separatists.” 

The remarkable turnaround came “amid a deteriorating security situation that had made terrorism a top concern for voters. In the weeks leading up to the vote, Turkish televisions were filled with grim images of deadly attacks carried out by suspected Islamic State bombers, military crackdowns on Kurdish cities, and funerals for Turkish security officers killed by Kurdish fighters.

“The dangers culminated in a devastating Oct. 10 attack by two suspected Islamic State suicide bombers who killed more than 100 people at a peace rally in Turkey’s capital. The bombing, which some called “Turkey’s 9/11,” was the country’s deadliest terrorist attack, and it cemented fears that the increasingly polarized country was facing unchecked instability.”

Erdogan and the AKP then won voters over with "its message that one-party rule was the only way to fight a two-front war with Islamic State extremists and Kurdish militants.”  The message resonated “not only with nationalists who backed Mr. Erdogan’s decision to renew the country’s fight with the outlawed… PKK, but also with Kurdish residents rattled by renewed violence that had consumed their communities.”

Erdogan, while cynically supported the most extreme forms of terrorism in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian government, has utilized those same terrorists as a pretext to wage a full scale war against the Kurds, using the situation to degrade Kurdish influence and capitalize on a state of fear and war for political gain, championing himself as the answer to ‘Kurdish terrorism’ while it was his policies that reignited the violence.  Following a defeat in parliament at the hands of the Kurds, while simultaneously facing a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish issue, the orchestration of state-violence was commenced.  Further aided by some of the country’s deadliest terrorism, committed by a group that Erdogan supports, the desired outcome was realized.

“The election results show that the politics of fear and division worked,” said David L. Phillips, a former State Department adviser who now serves as director of the Peace-Building and Rights Program at Columbia University.”

The strategy of tension had succeeded.

Turkey's War Against the Kurds (Part 1): The Strange and Tragic Case of Turkey in Syria

Turkey’s Crimes

As Turkey has been waging a brutal and murderous campaign against its Kurdish population in the south of the country it has also illegally shelled Kurdish factions inside Syria that are threatening the remaining supply lines used by Turkey to arm various jihadi groups.  Increasingly Erdogan has become more irrational, bent on consolidating power domestically and increasing his imperial presence over his neighbors abroad.  The actions are part of a desire to reinvigorate Turkish power in the spirit of the former Ottoman Empire, and have been used in accordance with US imperial designs for the region.

Domestically Erdogan and his ruling AK Party have been pushing for constitutional amendments that would grant President Erdogan de-facto dictatorial power over policy formation, allowing him to dictate policy and bypass most congressional roadblocks.  Yet in absence of achieving this Erdogan has consolidated his rule through a plethora of actions, including litigation against any opposition, usage of the courts to stifle dissent, unprecedented attacks against journalism, and unilateral covert operations, all of which add up to a ruthless consolidation of power into the hands of the executive, allowing Erdogan to function as a unilateral actor in absence of constitutional authority to do so.

During the beginning of the uprisings in Syria Turkey was essentially contracted to carry out the US policy of regime-change by proxy.  The plans drawn up by NATO high command envisioned Turkey acting as the conduit whereby rebel fighters from across the Middle East, recruited and trained by Western intelligence agencies, would be smuggled into Syria and where their supply lines and training camps would be protected.  In December of 2011, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi reports, citing contacts within the US intelligence community, that “NATO is already clandestinely engaged in the Syrian conflict, with Turkey taking the lead as U.S. proxy… Unmarked NATO warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to Iskenderum [sic] on the Syrian border, delivering weapons from the late Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals as well as volunteers from the Libyan Transitional National Council... French and British special forces trainers are on the ground, assisting the Syrian rebels while the CIA and U.S. Spec Ops are providing communications equipment and intelligence to assist the rebel cause.”

While former Libyan rebels were funneled in, “thousands of Muslim fighters” from across the region were also to be enlisted, yet most of these turned out to be ISIS and al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.  According to a US State Department 2014 report on terrorism, “the rate of foreign terrorist fighter travel to Syria [during 2014]- totaling more than 16,000 foreign terrorist fighters from more than 90 countries as of late December – exceeded the rate of foreign terrorist fighters who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, or Somalia at any point in the last 20 years.”  State Department officials later would admit that of the foreign fighters entering Syria, “almost all” of them cross through the Turkish border.

Though a myriad of evidence exists documenting Turkey's support for al-Qaeda and ISIS, including former Turkish intelligence (MIT) officer testimony and former ISIS member testimony, a mere look on a map is enough to reveal how the ISIS and al-Qaeda supply lines that guarantee these groups existence run directly through the Turkish border.  The lid was really blown off the operation however when it was revealed that trucks belonging to Turkish intelligence were caught supplying weapons and ammunition for al-Qaeda rebels in Syria.  The findings were corroborated by official Turkish military documents, court testimonies, and photographic and video evidence.  Further, following a US special forces raid on the compound of an Islamic State leader in May of 2015, a senior western official with access to the intelligence caches confirmed that the recovered evidence proved direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking ISIS members was now “undeniable.” 

Also undeniable is Turkey’s connections to the ISIS oil trade.  It is known that ISIS smuggles its oil through Turkey to the global market, and given Turkish intelligence’s intimate relations with the leaders of the group it would be naïve to think the authorities don’t have a hand in the operation.  According to Ali Ediboglu, a Turkish parliamentarian, $800 million worth of oil is being smuggled and sold by ISIS inside Turkey.  Yet, as pointed out by Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, “that was over a year ago.  By now, this implies that Turkey has facilitated over $1 billion worth of black market ISIS oil sales to date.” (emphasis added) 

This represents just one of a myriad of instances of high-level Turkish officials accusing Turkey of complicity in the buying and smuggling of ISIS oil, many of which also report that Erdogan’s son-in-law is heavily involved. 

Martin Chulov of the Guardian, who reported on ISIS’ “undeniable” links to Turkish officials, is quoted in the Turkish paper Birgun as saying that Turkish security forces are responsible for protecting the illicit trade.

Thus Turkish intelligence, acting as the proxy of the US and NATO, has been clandestinely supporting the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and now is even openly supporting al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate.  In addition to this it has also lent its support to a myriad of other jihadis, including al-Qaeda linked “Turkmen” and Uighur terrorists.

The Telegraph would report that “Around a dozen Turkmen militias have formed, some directly supported by the Turkish government,” which have been “fighting alongside other rebel groups, including the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.”

According to a 2015 report by Christina Lin, Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS-Johns Hopkins University, “A new article reported that 3,500 Uyghurs are settling in a village near Jisr-al Shagour that was just taken from Assad, close to the stronghold of Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) that is in the Turkey-backed Army of Conquest. They are allegedly under the supervision of Turkish intelligence that has been accused of supplying fake passports to recruit Chinese Uyghurs to wage jihad in Syria.”

These claims were corroborated by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh. 

In a recent piece Hersh quotes Imad Moustapha, Syria’s ambassador to China, as saying in regards to the Chinese position on Syria that “Many Uighur fighters now in Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – an often violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish intelligence to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence.’”  Hersh goes on to say that “Moustapha’s concerns were echoed by a Washington foreign affairs analyst who has closely followed the passage of jihadists through Turkey and into Syria. The analyst, whose views are routinely sought by senior government officials, told me that ‘Erdoğan has been bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his government has been agitating in favour of their struggle in China.”

Erdogan Cracks Down

The Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, which broke the story of the MIT trucks smuggling arms to al-Qaeda, faced a heavy backlash.  As a result of litigation based upon accusations of “exposing state secrets” and “trying to topple the government” the paper’s editor Can Dundar and its Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul now face life-sentences for reporting on the crimes of the state.  Furthermore, any news organization in the country that holds to its journalistic duty of holding a light up to power has been targeted, suppressed, vilified, and jailed.  Press freedoms in Turkey, virtually non-existent, are some of the most abysmal in the world: the recent Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index ranks Turkey 149^th out of a total of 180 countries. 

As Noam Chomsky and Christophe Deloire report, “journalism is being murdered” in Turkey. 

“Four days before the Nov. 1 parliamentary elections, the police stormed Ipek Media Group headquarters and shut down its two opposition dailies and two opposition TV stations. After control of management had been secured and 71 journalists fired, these outlets resumed operations with a new editorial line verging on caricature. The dailies, Bugun and Millet, ran Erdogan’s photo on the front page along with the headlines “The president among the people” and “Turkey united.”” 

Yet after the ruling AK Party recovered an absolute parliamentary majority, the journalistic oppression only intensified: “Two days after the elections, two journalists were jailed on charges of “inciting an armed revolt against the state” in a story. Since then, some 30 other journalists have been placed under investigation for “terrorist propaganda” or “insulting the president” — the two most common charges.” 

Later Turkey launched a crackdown on a total of 14 TV channels and removed them from the state-owned Turksat Communications infrastructure.  One of those that was shut down was a television station broadcasting in Kurdish which regularly featured rational Kurdish voices promoting peace between Kurds and Turks.

Turkey as well is no stranger to censoring the internet, it is responsible for more than half of all government requests to Twitter to remove content, far in the lead of any other nation, and it consistently bans its citizens from accessing the entire YouTube platform.

However, one of the most important cases, one that is hardly every reported on, is that of the journalist Serena Shim, who very likely was murdered at the hands of Turkish intelligence or one of their rebel proxies. 

Serena was an American journalist of Lebanese descent working for PressTV (Iranian media) who had been extensively covering the war in Syria, and more importantly, the connections between Turkish intelligence and extremist rebel factions fighting against Assad.  Later confirmed through court proceedings and official documentation, Serena, from first-hand experience on the ground, was one of the first to report on evidence that ISIS and al-Qaeda militants were being smuggled into Syria through Turkey in trucks disguised as humanitarian aid vehicles bearing the symbols of NGO’s and the World Food Organization.  The reports had drawn attention to the notion that Turkish intelligence were involved in the smuggling operation.

On October 14^th, 2014, Serena was killed in a car crash in Turkey that can only be described, in the very mildest of terms, as “suspicious.”  Days before her death, Serena had very publicly expressed deep concerns that she was being targeted by Turkish intelligence.  Turkey had branded her as a “spy” and sent agents to places she had been working, asking residents about her whereabouts and telling them to turn her in if they saw her.  Serena said “I’m very surprised at this accusation – I even thought of approaching Turkish intelligence because I have nothing to hide.”  She said that she was “a bit worried, because...Turkey has been labeled by Reporters Without Borders as the largest prison for journalists…so I am frightened about what they might use against me.”  She suspected the reason they were targeting her was because of her reports: “We were some of the first people on the ground –if not the first people – to get that story of those takfiri militants going in through the Turkish border…being sent in, I’ve got images of them in World Food Organization trucks. It was very apparent that they were takfiri militants by their beards and by the clothes they wore, and they were going in there with NGO trucks.” (emphasis added)

She also made it clear that she thought she was being targeted as a means to scare other journalists from reporting on these issues: “I’ve been stopped by them before, but not necessarily to this level, just by police basically. But for the intelligence to actually look for me, that's rather odd, so I think that they're definitely trying to get the word out to journalists to be careful so much as to what they say...”

Days later she was killed when her car collided with another vehicle. 

Turkey quickly labelled the incident as a tragic “accident”, yet Serena’s family was not as satisfied with that account.  Her sister Fatmeh expressed no doubts that Turkey had in some way been involved in her sister’s death.  “I think it was planned and plotted,” she said.  The story just didn’t add up.

Given the accuracy of her reports, later confirmed, and the extraordinarily damning evidence that they contained about crimes committed by the Turkish state, it is very likely that she struck a nerve close to the heart of Turkish power and that her sister was indeed right about the extremely suspicious circumstances in which her death occurred.

When you are involved in substantially supporting international terrorism, committing what the Nuremburg Tribunal labelled as the “supreme international crime” of aggression against another state, while as well engaging in massive human rights violations against your own population, it follows that you will seek to rule absent the annoyance of criticism and being held accountable for your crimes.  Erdogan and the AKP have shown that they seek to unilaterally rule the Turkish state, and to silence any dissent against them.

In recent months however Turkish journalists and parliamentarians have bravely continued to expose state crimes, in a climate of dissent that in spite of overwhelming government oppression continues to be one of the most intrepid and honorable throughout the world.  Turkish MP Eren Erden recently cited evidence from a court investigation that, with the help of Turkish authorities, sarin gas precursors were smuggled through Turkey into ISIS camps in Syria where the sarin agent was then compounded, building on a body of evidence that shows Syrian rebels had access to sarin, and likely carried out the 2013 attacks as a false flag in order to get the Americans to invade.

He now faces charges of treason for exposing the information.

The Cumhuriyet daily which first exposed the MIT truck smuggling operation as well has recently published intercepted communications between members of the Turkish Armed Forces and ISIS fighters, in which the interlocutors continually refer to each other as “brother” as they coordinate various operations.

Such commitment to honest journalism in the face of state repression is as honorable as the repression against it is despicable.  Yet the escalation of violence against the Kurds in Turkey and the shelling of the Kurds in northern Syria must be seen within this context; they are interwoven with Erdogan’s pursuit of power consolidation domestically and with Turkey’s project to overthrow the Syrian state through support to the most extremist factions fighting in Syria.  It is the Kurds in Syria that are threatening the Turkish project through their advances upon the border corridors through which the Turkish supply lines to their terror proxies flow.

To be continued in Part 2...

The New York Times Lies Again About Syria and the Rebels

The New York Times recently ran a big front-page piece, taking up more than a full page, seeking to explain the recent developments in Syria.  Anne Bernard, the Times’ leading reporter on the Middle East, who mainly operates from Beirut and gets her information from rebel sources, unfortunately grossly fails to inform her readers on some very basic and easily accessible facts that would be journalistic commonplace if we had anything remotely resembling a free press in the US.

The piece begins with some good reporting on the ceasefire and the problems and successes of its implementation, and then goes on to note one of the main talking-points of the opposition: “One of the main concerns of beleaguered opposition forces was that the government would continue to take territory, attacking all insurgents while claiming it was battling only the two groups excluded from the truce: the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate.”

Firstly, the characterization of the rebels as “opposition” and “insurgents” is common practice in Western media reports, yet it shields the fact that the rebel opposition is, and has been for years, dominated by al-Qaeda and ISIS.(1)  In failing to report this fact, which is also available from multiple US intelligence agency reports, Bernard and the NYT in effect protect the al-Qaeda forces on the ground from the eyes of the Western public, and in doing so protect the complicity of Western governments in supporting them. 

Instead of fulfilling its journalistic function of holding accountable those in power, the NYT instead serves to propagandize for government policy.

Bernard further does this by describing the non-ISIS opposition as “a broad array that includes the Nusra Front, Islamists, and relatively secular groups led by army defectors and backed by the United States and its allies,” failing to note the prominence of the extremists and the fact that the “relatively secular groups” “only operate under license from the extreme jihadists.”  Also, describing the “moderates” as secular is entirely misleading and false, as almost all want some form of Islamic state and are almost exclusively Sunni Muslim.

Going further the intimate, longstanding, and “brotherly” working relationship between the US-backed FSA and al-Qaeda is described in the piece only as “different degrees” of “tactical alliances.” 

 

Initially after the signing of the ceasefire deal, the US-backed FSA were some of the biggest critics of the fact that their al-Qaeda ally was not included, which the US initially tried to make happen before the proposal of protecting al-Qaeda terrorists was rejected by Russia.  Main FSA leaders described al-Qaeda as their “partners”, as an “honorable” faction, and claimed that it fights on the ground with “most of the brigades that attended the Riyadh conference,” which essentially includes all the main groups except for Nusra and ISIS.

A few months before that al-Qaeda made a video showing a Nusra leader presenting a gift to an FSA commander, thanking him for using US-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles in support of al-Qaeda while claiming that al-Qaeda and the FSA “are one.”

In 2013, the US-backed FSA commander Col. Okaidi, described as one the biggest recipient of US aid, who to this day can be seen being given air time by Western media to mobilize support for the opposition, described his relationship with ISIS as “good, even brotherly” after having won a main victory while exercising a degree of operational command over ISIS.  After having admitted to fighting alongside al-Qaeda, Okaidi explains that al-Nusra does not “exhibit any abnormal behavior, which is different from that of the FSA,” admitting that the sectarian ferocity of al-Qaeda which is often pilloried by the West was no different from the actions of his FSA rebels, that the US supports.

Yet not only is this an intimate alliance that is years in the making, it is as well one that has been ordered by the US and its allies.

In the overtaking of Idlib in 2014, Charles Lister, at the time of the Brookings Doha Center, revealed from interviews with rebel commanders that they received specific instructions from US-led operations rooms to align themselves within al-Qaeda’s ranks and to use their increasing shipments of US-supplied weapons in support of al-Qaeda.

Earlier in 2014 the commander of the US-backed SRF revealed that “those who support us”, i.e. the CIA and its allies, specifically “told us” to “send weapons to [Islamist fighters in] Yabroud” and therefore “we sent a lot of weapons there.”

Anne Bernard however thought only to describe all of this as the rebels having “joined in tactical alliances to different degrees.” 

This, in turn, is said to be a “political conundrum” since “Mr. Assad and his allies argue that that makes all rebels legitimate targets.”

In the world of the NYT, the fact that the US and the CIA are supporting al-Qaeda, arming and funding fighters that fight alongside them and pass weapons to them, thus actively committing treason by providing material support to US-designated terrorists organizations, is not something of much note or something that necessitates further investigation to get to the bottom of.  Even if such collaborations were only “tactical alliances to different degrees”, this should be headline news.  Instead, Assad and Russia are made out to be the irrational ones, arguing that they have a right to strike US-backed rebels operating under license from and in support of al-Qaeda within an al-Qaeda dominated insurgency. 

Yes, of course they are the crazy ones, and not us for openly supporting rebels that make up al-Qaeda’s ranks.

And despite this ubiquitous narrative of “Russia and Assad are targeting the moderates”, the NYT informs us that in reality Russia has attempted to alleviate US concerns by “challenging Washington to provide the coordinates for the groups it supports to prevent them from being attacked.”  So far, however, the US has refused.

And it’s easy to see why, if they complied it would expose the fact that in effect the US-sponsored groups operate mainly as weapons conduits for the al-Qaeda rebels winning the battles.  This allegation is so strong in fact that it was enough for the UK courts to drop multiple cases against individuals they attempted to prosecute for aiding terrorist organizations, the defendants arguing that if they were guilty so was the UK.  In addition, classified US intelligence reports which detail how most of the CIA arms shipments were going to “hard-line Islamic jihadists” was reported by the NYT itself back in 2012.  Further, in 2014 none other than Vice President Biden said that “there was no moderate middle” that the US was supporting since “the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers,” and instead “the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”(2)

This non-controversial, easily-accessible information is however spared from the informed readers of the NYT.

Furthermore, one of the biggest pieces of recent news wasn’t even reported in the NYT piece. 

Just a few days ago Kurdish forces in the district of Sheikh-Maqsood near Aleppo claimed that they were struck by chemical weapons that were launched at them from the Turkish-backed al-Qaeda rebels.  They go on to directly accuse Turkey of supplying the chemical weapons.  This claim is not at all far-fetched, as recently a Turkish MP has come out with various forms of evidence linking Turkish authorities to aiding the smuggling of sarin precursors into Syria prior to the 2013 attacks.  So while the Western media, as the former British ambassador Craig Murray notes, fakes allegations of chemical weapons attacks by Assad it specifically refuses to cover when rebels backed by the West use similar chemical weapons against the Kurds.

Lastly, the Anne Bernard report correctly notes that, “There is no clear count of [ceasefire] violations, though various parties are trying to keep track.”  However, it is interesting the note the few examples that she did include; all of the so-called government violations were within or on the borders of Idlib Province.  It just so happens that Idlib is completely dominated by al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda is not included in the ceasefire.

Also to note is the fact that multiple instances of “insurgent” violations were shellings and sniper attacks against the besieged towns of Foua and Kafarya.  Kafarya and Foua are towns that have been under brutal siege by al-Qaeda and US-backed “moderate” rebels, and have been besieged for many months prior to the beginning of the highly publicized government siege of Madaya.  Residents there are suffering from starvation, a lack of adequate food and water supplies, a severe shortage of fuel, electricity, and badly needed medicine.  Despite some recent aid deliveries, as with Madaya it is not enough, and on top of all of it the civilian population are constantly subjected to deadly attack by the rebels in the form of unrelenting rocket shellings, suicide bombings against civilians, and murderous sniper attacks.  Apparently they are “unworthy victims”,(3) as the paper doesn’t even attempt to provide context for their plight, nor explain, let alone show outrage, over the fact that the Western-backed opposition is constantly attacking the trapped civilians, not even relenting during the ceasefire.  Instead it is just reported in passing that “Insurgent snipers attacked the besieged towns of Fouaa and Kfarya, killing at least one person and injuring several,” and “Islamist insurgents shelled a village near Fouaa.”

One wonders how different the report would look if Assad or Russia had been indiscriminately shelling and sniping off trapped civilians in Madaya.

The New York Times, and its chief Syria reporter Anne Bernard, continually fail to in their journalistic duties.  Instead they have served to mobilize support for the government and the powerful societal interests that control and finance them.(4)

If we even had a pretention of living in a society with a semblance of a free press these kinds of basic facts would be readily reported to the American public. 

Instead, the NYT continues to mislead and deceive.

Notes:

1.)    “… [2014] the Syrian military opposition is dominated by ISIS and by Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda representative, in addition to other extreme jihadi groups.  In reality, there is no dividing wall between them and America’s supposedly moderate opposition allies.”  Patrick Cockburn, “The Rise of ISIS”, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (Brooklyn, NY, 2015), pg. 3. Print

2.)   Ibid.

3.)   Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, “Worthy and Unworthy Victims”, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, 2002), pg. 37-86. Print.

4.)   Ibid, pg. xi.