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A Former CIA Director's Syria Confessions
Mike Pompeo says that during his time as Trump's CIA director (from 2017 to 2018, before being tapped as Secretary of State), he understood in real-time that American weapons being shipped to so-called 'moderate' rebels in Syria were in fact going to al-Qaeda and other hardline jihadists.
In essence, it's a much belated confession from the highest level of the intelligence community (as America's top spy chief overseeing the waning days of the program) that the agency's covert Timber Sycamore program to arm the anti-Assad insurgency in Syria, which had been going strong since the opening years of the war under Obama (the Syria conflict began in 2011), in the end provided US weapons to designated terrorist organizations.
Image: C-Span While this information certainly isn't new for anyone that over the years sought out independent and alternative media reporting on Syria, what is unprecedented is the confirmed admission of arming al-Qaeda coming straight from a director of the CIA.
It wasn't too long ago that mainstream media and US officials quickly labeled any sources pointing out this inconvenient truth as a "conspiracy theorist" - in an effort to hide the reality from public view (for a prime example of such coverage, see this Daily Beast article).
But here's what Pompeo writes in his new memoir, published in late January, entitled Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love [emphasis ours]:
Later that summer, while I was still running the CIA, the US government began reconsidering support for Syrian rebels who were fighting Assad - an action I recommended to the president. The truth was that ever since Russia and Iran intervened in the conflict to save Assad, the rebels Washington was backing had steadily lost their effectiveness as a fighting force. These programs, with enormous price tags, had become black holes of taxpayer dollars.
That's when he candidly points out that the "enormous" effort to weaponize the "rebels" was ultimately to the benefit of al-Qaeda and other terrorists:
And American weapons were ending up in the hands of al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups. Of course, like any group of liberals, the previous administration had pushed multiple programs along for years without seeing any meaningful results. I ended it. We had to accept that these efforts didn't work.
It should be noted that multiple declassified and leaked US government memos going back to the very start of the war long ago proved what Pompeo now belatedly and willingly confesses (see for example, the 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency "Salafist Principality" intelligence doc).
Interestingly, Pompeo's framing of the issue in the book seems to hinge more on US frustration that the covert drive to topple the Assad government failed - or as he says it... didn't produce "any meaningful results" (given that of course Assad is still in power), and not on the fact that the US was in effect arming terrorists, such as al-Qaeda and even ISIS.
Or put another way: Mr. Pompeo, where's the outrage that the CIA was arming al-Qaeda, as you confess? Where are the investigations? Where are the Congressional hearings? Where are the denunciations of those prior CIA and National Security Council officials who fueled the AQ and ISIS insurgencies in their mad drive to oust Assad and set the region on fire?
While the decade-long proxy war for regime change has now largely come to an end (though Idlib still festers), the Syrian people are now on a daily basis enduring the devastation, economic collapse, and ashes left in the wake of the CIA and US allies' covert backing of death squads that terrorized the population.
And it remains that at this very moment, foreign-backed Chechens and other jihadists are living in Syrian Christian homes in Idlib, having long ago executed or exiled their Syrian inhabitants, and turned churches into mosques.
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Billions spent. Countless and priceless lives lost.
Thank you CIA. |
