Last week after reports emerged of more embarrassing details of US trained “Syrian moderates” either defecting or giving their weapons to ISIS in exchange for safe passage, the Pentagon had come out and denied this story. On Friday McClatchyDC ran this story:
Category Archives: Military
No they didn’t; yes they did
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Charlie Rose interview of Putin
Here’s the link to the CBS Charlie Rose interview: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/vladimir-putin-russian-president-60-minutes-charlie-rose/
The video of the interview is very interesting, but I’ll warn you that the viagra ads every few minutes got old fast. There were some very interesting exchanges and Rose certainly asked some very probing questions. Had a busy day cooking and spending time with my granddaughters, so I’ll save further comments for later.
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Explaining Russia’s True Presence in Syria
There is Russian activity in Syria outside of Bassel al Assad air base, but the airfield is Moscow’s main effort.
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Putin begins his PR campaign
Here’s a report from the UK Telegraph on Putin’s Syria plan:
“Putin steps up campaign to reassert Assad’s power in” Syria
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UK Telegraph report
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Birds of a feather and “The Polish Plan”

Back in 2006 my husband and I took a cross-country trip to New Mexico. We were going to visit our son at an Air Force base there, where he was assigned, before he deployed to Iraq. As evening approached we entered the state of Arkansas and decided to stop at a motel for the night. We ended up at an exit, where the tourist gimmick appeared to be a bird, which was believed to have been extinct for 60 years, but allegedly was sighted on February 27, 2004.
I always like to ask the locals where the best places to eat are, rather than trust online searches or road signs. So, after we got settled in our room, I went and chatted up the receptionist at the front desk and off we went in search of a local BBQ joint. As we ate, I kept looking at the pictures of the ivory-billed woodpecker on the walls and I asked my husband if he knew what the big deal was about this woodpecker, which I had never heard of. He didn’t know either. Near the cash register were shelves filled with the usual tourist junk, much of it plastered with images of the “ivory-billed woodpecker”.
Yesterday, I commented several times on Senator Marco Rubio’s foreign policy piece, “Obama’s Pathetic Cave-in to Putin’s Power Play in Syria”. Rubio offers a lot of Cold War sounding rhetoric and insists he will arm the Syrian moderate rebels. I believe this “Syrian moderate” strategy was foolish from the very beginning and a recipe to inadvertently place heavy weapons into the hands of ISIS, jihadists or Assad’s forces, because really do “moderates” win wars against committed, hardened fighters? I doubt it and much to our embarrassment, we have armed “moderates” numerous times in Syria, only to have them walk away with our training and weapons and join ISIS. Here’s part of one of the exchanges with an ardent supporter of arming “Syrian moderates”:
The image above is from a post card I bought at that BBQ joint in 2006. Our waitress, a very young woman, who looked to be still in her teens, cautiously answered my questions about this elusive “ivory-billed woodpecker”. I asked her if she thinks the sightings of this woodpecker, long believed to be extinct, are true or a hoax. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled. She said she didn’t know for sure, but a lot of “experts” from back East believe it and came to search for that bird.
As I read Patrick Poole’s report at PJ Media today of another Syrian moderate we trained who took our weapons and joined ISIS, I thought our search for “Syrian moderates”, which began based largely on neoconservative think-tank “experts and a young Syria “expert” at the Institute for the Study of War/political director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Elizabeth O’Bagy seems much like the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Today, GEN Petraeus testified before Congress, I am presuming at the request of the likes of Senator John McCain, the neoconservative “Arm Syrian Moderates”, and to offer his insights into the fight against ISIS. He thinks the US should establish safe zones in Syria, that will ostensibly encourage moderate Sunnis to fight against ISIS. He stated:
“The central problem in Syria is that Sunni Arabs will not be willing partners against the Islamic State unless we commit to protect them and the broader Syrian population against all enemies, not just ISIS,” Petraeus said using an acronym for the militant group. “That means protecting them from the unrestricted warfare being waged against them by Bashar Assad, especially by his air force and its use of barrel bombs.”
He suggested that the U.S. tell Assad that if he continues to use barrel bombs, the U.S. will stop the Syrian air force from flying.
“We have that capability,” he said. “It would demonstrate that the United States is willing to stand against Assad and it would show the Syrian people that we can do what the Islamic State cannot — provide them with a measure of protection.”
At the same time, Petraeus warned against rushing to oust Assad without knowing who would fill the resulting political vacuum in the country.
Putin has moved Russian military personnel, equipment and fighters into Syria to bolster Assad. Putin has had meetings with the regional leaders and even with Israel and ironed out an understanding about Russia’s aims to help the Syrian state, to avoid any misunderstanding about how the IDF forces will respond to Assad transferring arms to Hezbollah. Yet. GEN Petraeus talks about creating some safe zone for imaginary Sunni moderates and he believes they will want to fight ISIS for us, when in truth, those Sunnis’ mortal enemy is really Assad, not ISIS (radical Salafists, who are Sunnis). Nowhere in Petraeus’ statement is a recognition of Russia’s diplomatic effort and coordination with regional leaders and even Israel or an insistence that we must talk to Putin to avoid escalating this into a US vs. Russian conflict very quickly, if US and Russian planes are operating in tight air space over Syria. Nope, it’s more magical-thinking that we’re going to create some viable proxy forces to fight ISIS for us. He argued that the US should not allow Putin to push us into an alliance with Assad. Instead he’s fine with the US supporting the Baghdad government, which relies heavily on Iranian backed militias to fight the Islamic State. And we’re going to chug along rebuilding the Iraqi Army – again. He did deliver the requisite catchphrase to be thrown around – this time, the clever, Russian-themed one for the pundits to saber-rattle and fear-monger to sway public opinion for another regime change in the Mid-East. He said:
“He called Syria a “geopolitical Chernobyl — spewing instability and extremism over the region and the rest of the world.””
The experts in search of the ivory-billed woodpecker began their search for the elusive bird in the eastern woods of Arkansas, then spread out to search in 8 different states. They did not find any. Last night I believed that poster’s plan, which I facetiously referred to as “The Polish Plan”, was laughable, but today with the “geopolitical Chernobyl” hyperbole, it sounds like it just might be an expansion of the neoconservative experts’ new “Syrian moderate” plan – the search for “Syrian refugee moderates”. One place they likely won’t find any is Poland, because the Poles were smart enough to say they are not Western Europe and they don’t want any terrorists….
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Lunatics running the asylum
The Obama transformation continues – he nominates first openly gay Secretary of the Army, which means his sexuality played a role in his selection – otherwise why mention it? The Army has about a third of its combat brigades combat ready and this administration focuses on its diversity social-engineering goals???
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Liars and damned liars!
To keep the pieces of information together – remember the report late last month about the intelligence higher ups within the Pentagon cooking the books on our effort (of lack therof) to defeat the Islamic State. On August 26, 2015, The New York Times reported on an IG investigation:
The investigation began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central Command — the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign and other efforts against the Islamic State — were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama, the government officials said.
By September 9, 2015, that “one analyst” turned into more than 50 intelligence analysts complained, which The Daily Beast reported:
More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.
The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence. The fact that so many people complained suggests there are deep-rooted, systemic problems in how the U.S. military command charged with the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State assesses intelligence.
“The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official said.
Along with that happy pile of crap, we’ve been regaled with this training Syrian moderates to fight the Islamic State in Syria since 2013. On September 3, 2013, I wrote about everyone, from John McCain to John Kerry in the State Department, relying on Elizabeth O’Bagy’s assessment of the situation on the ground in Syria. O’Bagy ran an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, replete with her map, which looked like the map John Kerry adopted. I wrote about O’Bagy also being the political director of a lobbying group, the Syrian Emergency Task Force. I mentioned this on a popular blog, Diplomad 2.0, in the comments section and provided the link to my blog. Our government was relying on this young woman’s assessment on the “Syrian moderates” in Syria.
On September 15, 2013, I wrote a short blog post stating:
The UK Telegraph ran a report today from IHS Jane’s, stating that nearly half of the rebel fighters in Syria are hardline Islamists/jihadis (report here). According to Charles Lister, the author of the report, the idea that the insurgency is mostly secular in nature, just isn’t borne out by the facts. Just a reminder that a week and a half ago John Kerry was still quoting Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy, former senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, with her lowball estimates of radical Syrian rebels (Reuters report here). My how “facts” change so quickly ……..
On August 13, 2015, McClatchyDC reported:
“In the first week of September 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared before congressional hearings in hopes of drumming up support for the Obama administration’s plan to retaliate militarily for the Syrian government’s deadly use of chemical weapons outside Damascus.”
the article continues:
“At another hearing that week, Kerry responded to a lawmaker’s skepticism about the existence of moderate rebels by saying that only a fraction of the fighters were “al Qaida and the bad guys.” Maybe 15 to 25 percent, he estimated.
“There is a real moderate opposition that exists,” Kerry said.If the skeptical lawmaker was reassured, professional Syria watchers were not. Many were aghast at what sounded to them like either dangerous naivete or an outright lie, given that the U.S. government’s own internal assessments had found from very early in the conflict that al Qaida-style extremists were playing an outsized role in the rebel fight.”
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article31018362.html#storylink=cpy
Just whose intelligence information was John Kerry relying on?
Now we have the CENTCOM commander, General Lloyd Austin, reporting to Congress this lame crap about how the training Syrian moderates is going and instead of ditching this failed program – they’re revamping it… All at the American taxpayer’s expense. Enough already, this isn’t working and this commander should be relieved immediately!!! And before the press lets Senator John McCain do his usual grandstanding – he has been instrumental in selling bad information to the American public on the “Syrian moderates” and when Elizabeth O’Bagy was fired from the Institute for the Study of War, back in 2013, for lying about her credentials, John McCain hired her to be on his staff. This “Syrian moderate” delusion is not just an Obama failure, it’s a bipartisan failure. And maybe, someone can actually tell us who exactly is Elizabeth O’Bagy, who are her contacts in Syria, who is her family, who introduced her to John McCain, and don’t forget McCain’s trip to Syria in early 2013 with the Syrian Emergency Task Force as his guide. Let’s answer the questions about who all those people he posed with in those Syria trip photos are. Time to come clean about the whole mess!
When we get the answers to all that, let’s zero in on Huma Abedin and her connections and handlers in the Muslim Brotherhood. Let’s look at her influence on Madame Secretary during the not-so-glorious Arab Spring. We have been betrayed by witless fools in our own government!
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Austin: Only ‘Four or Five’ US-Trained Rebel Fighters Remain in Syria
Commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. Lloyd Austin III testified Wednesday before the Senate Armed
Source: Austin: Only ‘Four or Five’ US-Trained Rebel Fighters Remain in Syria
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