Russia Accuses U.S. of controlling an "international terrorist alliance"

CBS News
September 29, 2016


MOSCOW -- Russian officials accused the U.S. on Thursday of siding with “terrorists” in Syria, in a sign of escalating tensions between Moscow and Washington amid the battle for the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.
U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby’s warning that the collapse of U.S.-Russian cooperation in Syria could lead to a rise in extremism and potential attacks against Russia drew Moscow’s anger.
The Russian Foreign and Defense Ministries both cast it as U.S. encouragement of terror attacks on Russia.
“We can’t assess those statements as anything else but a call, a directive for action,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing.
Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Kirby’s statement amounted to “the most frank confession by the U.S. side so far that the whole ‘opposition’ ostensibly fighting a ‘civil war’ in Syria is a U.S.-controlled international terrorist alliance.”
“What makes Kirby’s statement particularly shocking is that the scale of direct U.S. influence on terrorists’ activity is global and reaches as far as Russia,” he said.
The remarks by Russian officials have shown a degree of mistrust and strain between Moscow and Washington after the collapse of the U.S.-Russia-brokered truce and the Syrianarmy onslaught on Aleppo backed by Russian warplanes. The growing friction makes it increasingly unlikely that the cease-fire could be revived.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday that Washington is “on the verge” of ending Syria talks with Moscow because of days of deadly bombings of Aleppo by Russian and Syrian planes.

Wayne Madsen: Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Was Front End for a Private Foreign Policy/Intelligence Operation

Public Intelligence Blog
September 26, 2016

Wayne Madsen

A mere cursory glance at some of Hillary Clinton’s emails yields what can only be described as a private foreign policy and intelligence operation. The operation involved Secretary of State Clinton, her personal State Department staff and outside consultants (including Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills), the Clinton Foundation (including Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea Clinton), former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Teneo, the global advisory firm established by Bill Clinton’s former chief aide Doug Band and that employed Abedin as a consultant while she was also working for the State Department.

Teneo’s advisory board included Bill Clinton and Blair and one of its major clients was the Clinton Foundation. Other key members of the private Clinton team were Jeffrey Feltman, the pro-Israeli Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs who now enjoys diplomatic cover as Under Secretary General of the United Nations for Political Affairs; Mrs. Clinton’s special assistant counselor Nora Toiv; senior adviser to the Secretary of State Bathsheba Crocker; State’s director of policy planning Anne-Marie Slaughter; U.S. envoy to the Syrian rebels Robert Ford; special advisor to the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia Jeremy Shapiro; Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Jacob Sullivan (the likely national security adviser in a Clinton administration and who is linked to former Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman), and the pro-Israeli private intelligence team at Stratfor, located in Austin, Texas.
A September 23, 2011 email is illustrative of some of the private foreign policy network. Mrs. Clinton not only permitted her odd cabal of pro-Israelis and one Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, Abedin, help target Qaddafi and Assad but they were also involved in undermining the government of Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, whose government included followers of Maronite leader Michel Aoun and Hezbollah. The Clinton team appeared to like the term applied to Mikati in one article on Lebanon: “dead man walking.”
One email sent through Clinton’s private server located at her home in Chappaqua, New York and marked “PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL” concerns back channel intelligence information received by Mrs. Clinton’s close confidante and Clinton Foundation consultant Sidney Blumenthal. Apparently, Blumenthal received the intelligence, which involved the civil war in Libya promoted by the Obama administration, from the Central Intelligence Agency via one of Blumenthal’s contacts, retired CIA European division chief Tyler Drumheller. Drumheller died in 2015 from pancreatic cancer.
The email was sent to Mrs. Clinton on September 12, 2012, the day U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other U.S. diplomatic personnel were killed when an armed jihadist group stormed a U.S. facility in Benghazi. The email passed on intelligence gleaned from the Libyan president Muhammad Yussef el Magariaf that the attack on the U.S. facility was carried out by Ansar al Sharia, led by the former Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) of General Abdelhakim Belhadj. The LIFG was affiliated with Al Qaeda. However, Stevens was also designated the chief U.S. liaison to Belhadj and had met with the terrorist leader to coordinate military action against Qaddafi. Under CIA supervision, Belhadj met with leaders of the anti-Assad “Free Syrian Army” in Istanbul in November 2011.
Magariaf and Egypt’s then president, Mohamed Morsi, were close allies and also members of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is known that Stevens was brokering deals that would ship Libyan arms, captured from the arsenals and caches of ousted Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, to Syrian jihadists trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad. Mrs. Clinton’s close aide, Huma Abedin, reportedly has links to the Muslim Brotherhood through her mother. Before he was killed by the armed attackers, Stevens met in Benghazi with a Turkish envoy, Turkish Consul General in Benghazi Ali Sait Akin, who was tasked with overseeing the Libyan arms transfers to the Syrian rebels through southern Turkey.
Other Clinton emails describe how Qaddafi received military assistance from Assad to help put down the jihadist rebellion that began, with CIA, NATO, and Israeli assistance, in eastern Libya. The operation involving Stevens now appears to have relied on Clinton’s private server for coordination purposes and as a way to segment the Libyan arms-for-Syria deal from other U.S. government agencies. It is also known that everything  the Clinton Foundation became involved in also carried a large cost as far as donations to the foundation were concerned. Stevens and three of his Benghazi personnel, along with Drumheller, are dead and as the Clintons know very well, dead men tell no tales. As is the case with every secret Middle East arms deal, there are profits to be made. Israel received a five percent profit when the U.S. secretly sold Iran weapons, through Israeli middlemen, during the Reagan administration. It is certain that the Turks made a profit on the sale of Libyan weapons to the Syrian rebels. Just how much of the Turkish profit ended up in the Clinton Foundation’s coffers?
A September 18, 2012 email from Blumenthal to “H” [Hillary] was marked CONFIDENTIAL but this was not a U.S. government classification but a private one used by Blumenthal, Clinton, and their associates. So, not only did Clinton maintain a private intelligence and foreign policy operation but she employed her own classified information management system. Both are egregious violations of U.S. national security law, as well as National Archives and Records Administration statutes and regulations. The Blumenthal memo to Clinton focuses on Assad and his and his family’s fears that they would meet the same fate as Assad’s ally Qaddafi. Mrs. Clinton laughed when Qaddafi was killed by CIA-supervised Libyan jihadis in Sirte and boasted, “We came, we saw, he died!”
Just as Qaddafi died in his ancestral home of Sirte, Blumenthal informs Clinton that Assad’s family home is in Qardaha, outside of predominantly Alawite Latakia. There is an indication that if Assad fled to Latakia, where his fellow Alawites and a Russian military base could protect him at least temporarily, Qardaha might also serve as Assad’s “Sirte,” where he and his family could be assassinated as easily as it was to assassinate Qaddafi in Sirte. Blumenthal tells Clinton in the email that if Assad fled to Latakia it would represent a “very short lived endgame.” Blumenthal also informs Clinton that Assad, unlike Qaddafi, is not willing to fight to the death. In fact, Qaddafi was not willing to fight to the death either. His motorcade was driving under the white flag of surrender to a site designated by Clinton’s State Department where he would turn himself into U.S. and NATO authorities. However, Mrs. Clinton had no desire to have Qaddafi reveal the chicanery of the United States before a trial in The Hague. The Qaddafi motorcade was attacked with the approval of Mrs. Clinton and Qaddafi was brutally sodomized before he was bayoneted and shot to death, all of which greatly amused the Secretary of State.
At one point in the September 18 email, Blumenthal confuses the Libya and Syria actions by writing, “Assad does realize that if he eventually forced to flee Libya [sic] and is unable to reach Russia or another allied state, he will be detained and face a trial  for human rights violations at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.” In a February 24, 2012 CONFIDENTIAL email from Blumenthal to Clinton there is a proposal that Assad and his family be allowed to flee to “Russia, Iran, or perhaps even India or Venezuela.” However, there is little doubt that as far as the Clinton team was concerned, there would never be trials or safe passage for either Assad or Qaddafi. They, like Iraq’s executed Saddam Hussein, knew too much about the questionable dealings of successive U.S. administrations, to be allowed to live. That Clinton was sent an article terming Lebanese Prime Minister Mikati as a “dead man walking” while also contemplating the deaths of Qaddafi and Assad also indicates that Mrs. Clinton had some sort of blood lust for male foreign leaders when she was Secretary of State. And that points to some sort of psychiatric problem with Mrs. Clinton.
The Republican-led House hearings on “Benghazi” never delved into how much of Clinton’s private intelligence and military operations were conducted outside the framework of the National Security Acts of 1947 and 1952. If Clinton was busy authorizing operations to remove Qaddafi and Assad outside of the system of Presidential Findings that govern U.S. government clandestine operations against foreign nations and interests, it would constitute treasonous activities on the part of the Secretary of State.
The emails also show that Clinton was apt to agree to any action proposed by her extremely pro-Israeli private foreign policy team. A March 2, 2012 email proposes that the U.S. back Israel in unilaterally annexing the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights as a way of undermining Assad.
It is obvious that Mrs. Clinton and her husband, the ex-president, believed they had some sort of entitlement to run their own foreign and intelligence operations, and making a huge profit for their “non-profit” foundation in the process. In 2008, the Clinton’s believed that they would inherit the White House without a threat from inside their party. Barack Obama upset the Clintons’ plans in 2008. The Clintons merely changed the law and regulations to suit themselves and they effectively ran their own foreign policy, with the help of Blair and Teneo, for the duration of Obama’s first term. Obama’s philosophy of delegating authority proved to be disastrous with the Clintons running the State Department. And the Middle East, and eventually Europe, is paying dearly for the crimes of the Clintons and their cronies.