US "Intelligence Assets" leading the Syrian
"Opposition", the Role of the Bilderberg and the CFR
by Chris Marsden - Global Research, July 18, 2012
- World Socialist Web Site - 2012-07-17
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MAR20120718&articleId=31960
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=161904#161904
In a July 12 article for the Guardian’s “Comment
is Free” section, Charlie Skelton poses the
fundamental question the world’s media does not want asked.
“The Syrian opposition: who’s doing the talking?”
is a devastating exposé of the intimate
connections between the Syrian opposition and the
US, British and French intelligence services,
along with top US neo-cons. It traces the
formation of the Syrian National Council and the
appointment of its leading personnel to
long-standing and well-funded plans for regime
change in Syria and more generally in the Middle
East. These plans date back to at least 2005, and
have been funded by Washington in an effort to
secure political control of the oil-rich region.
Skelton does not attempt to be comprehensive. He
focuses on a few of the most prominent members of
the SNC and identifies some of the most
vociferous proponents of military intervention as
being paid representatives of the Western powers.
Among those routinely cited as “official
spokesmen” or “pro-democracy campaigner” is the
Paris-based Syrian academic Bassma Kodmani, a
member of the executive bureau and head of the SNC’s foreign affairs.
Kodmani is a repeated visitor to the Bilderberg
group conference, an organisation of top
political figures dedicated to strengthening the
links between US and European imperialism and
securing their collective global interests under
the banner of promoting “Atlanticism.”
In 2005, she worked for the Ford Foundation in
Cairo. That year saw a marked deterioration in
US-Syria relations, with President George W. Bush
contemplating military intervention against Damascus alongside Israel.
In September, Kodmani was made the executive
director of the Arab Reform Initiative, funded by
the US Council on Foreign Relations and its
US/Middle East project—chaired by former national
security adviser General Brent Scowcroft.
“Financial oversight” of the project was given to
the Centre for European Reform (CER), a British
think-tank headed by Lord Kerr, deputy chairman of Royal Dutch Shell.
Kodmani is also a member of the European Council
on Foreign Relations, functioning as the
executive director of its Arab Reform Initiative.
Radwan Ziadeh, the SNC’s director of foreign
relations, is a senior fellow at the US Institute
of Peace and a signatory to a letter calling for
US military intervention alongside former head of
the CIA James Woolsey, Karl Rove and other
prominent neo-cons. He has acted as an
intermediary between the White House and the Syrian opposition since 2005.
Najib Ghadbian, a University of Arkansas
political scientist, is a member of the general
secretariat of the SNC and is on the advisory
board of a Washington-based Syrian Centre for
Political and Strategic Studies, along with Ziadeh.
Ausama Monajed of the SNC is the founder of
Barada Television, a pro-opposition satellite
broadcaster and the former “director of public
relations for the London-based Movement for
Justice and Development” (MJD). Both are heavily
funded by the US State Department, according to WikiLeaks.
Skelton cites some of the many hundreds of
millions of dollars channelled into the Syrian
opposition from the US and the Gulf States.
Among Monajed’s services to Washington was his
publishing an official policy statement of the
SNC, a document drafted by Michael Weiss of the
Henry Jackson Society calling for intervention in
Syria. The society is backed by top neo-cons such
as William Kristol and Richard Perle.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, whose
inflated figures on casualties are constantly
cited by the media, turns out to be one man, Rami
Abdul Rahman, based in Coventry and a clothes retailer.
Another Henry Jackson Society luminary is Hamza
Fakher, described by Nick Cohen of the Observer
as “one of the most reliable sources on the
crimes the regime’s news blackout hides.”
The stories he has initiated have been routinely cited as eye-witness reports.
Fakher is the communication manager of Monajed’s
London-based Strategic Research and
Communications Centre and an employee of Barada TV.
Skelton deserves credit for writing so honestly
on the network of connections between the Syrian
opposition and the US/European military security
apparatus. But the fact is that what he exposes
will be well known to the research departments of
the Guardian, the New York Times, BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, et al.
None of them are being hoodwinked by anyone. They
are willing conduits for imperialist war
propaganda who ask no questions of the sources
they cite because they do not want to undercut the drumbeat for war.
It is this that accounts for the scathing
denunciation of Skelton in the next day’s edition
of the Guardian by diplomatic editor Julian Borger
“US manipulation of news from Syria is a red
herring,” the headline declares, “The big picture is clear.”
Accusing Skelton of “innuendo,” a heavy use of
quotation marks to denote skepticism, “banal
prose” and other literary crimes, Borger defends
the various intelligence assets identified by
Skelton as “people who have devoted a substantial
share of their working life studying Syrian society and politics.”
This is a definition so value-free that could be
applied to any number of imperialist strategists and spies.
The clear importance of Bassma Kodmani in the SNC
hierarchy is simply dismissed, while Skelton is
even derided for describing the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR) as “a powerful US lobby
group,” for being “needlessly sinister”. It is
“America’s most prestigious foreign policy
talking shop and research centre”, Borger insists.
Borger in fact argues against his own faux-naïf
pose. No other foreign policy think tank is more
influential than the CFR, and Kodmani is there as
a trusted representative of US imperialist interests in the Middle East.
It must be added that Britain’s Socialist Workers
Party and its global co-thinkers, the Pabloite
United Secretariat, and other pseudo-left outfits
demonstrate a similar politically motivated
blindness to the true character of the Syrian opposition and its aims.
In June, Khalil Habash complained in the United
Secretariat’s International Viewpoint, “The
Syrian revolutionary process has since the
beginning been met by circumspection by some on
the left…accusing it of being a conspiracy of
Western imperialist and reactionary regional
countries such as Saudi Arabia. This trend has unfortunately continued….”
The SWP’s Simon Assaf was blunter still at the
annual Marxism 2012 event. He said that he did
not want to dwell on those alleging “conspiracy”
due to the involvement of Turkey, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia or the US because “it would take me too long to calm down”.
It is not simply that these groups refuse to take
a critical stance towards the opposition movement
and the diverse social forces it represents—as
would be necessary for anyone seeking to lay the
basis for the development of an independent
working class oppositional movement in Syria.
Like the Guardian and other mainstream media,
they very deliberately conceal the bourgeois,
Sunni-sectarian and pro-imperialist character of
the movement’s current leadership to conceal
great-power imperialist intrigues, the end result
of which will be more disastrous than even NATO’s war against Libya.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MAR20120718&articleId=31960
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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