The following is the preface to the book, ISIS IS US.
I strongly urge the reader to purchase and read the complete book: I especially recommend the Kindle version ($9.99) which can be read, searched, notated, sampled, and carried on any smart phone, as well as sharing quotes on social media.
https://www.amazon.com/ISIS-US-Shocking-Behind-Terror-ebook/dp/B019RXBP7M
Ambassadors of Terror
by John-Paul Leonard
The world has never seen anything quite like ISIS[4] before. Where in the world did it come from? Many pundits say this unique terrorist army would not exist if we had not crushed Saddam Hussein’s regime in Bush’s war on Iraq. Politicians like Donald Trump or Rand Paul are saying that Iraq, Libya and Syria were better off under Saddam, Qaddafi and Assad than they are now.
Americans had supported the war on Iraq “ to make the world safe for democracy” –to stop a dangerous dictator from oppressing his people and using weapons of mass destruction –not to plunge the Middle East into the hands of savage extremists who seem set on demolishing modern civilization.
The world was shocked by the ISIS blitz of June 2014 that captured huge areas of Iraq, oil fields and the second largest city, Mosul, nearly bringing the government in Baghdad to collapse. NBC News headlined, “ Huge Majority Regret Iraq War.” [5] A poll showed that only 22% of Americans still thought the Iraq war had been a good idea. This was a new low, down from 32% in 2013 and 62% in March 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell told the big lie at the UN about Saddam Hussein’s “ threat” to our security.
Apparently, many Americans make the link between the war on Iraq, and the rise of terrorism in the region.
Few critics, however, have gone so far as to accuse the US or its allies of the unthinkable madness of intentionally creating ISIS.[6] For us in the US this would be difficult to accept. We cherish the faith that our nation is a force for good in the world; we want to share the good things about America with the rest of the world when we can. Yet we have also heard of a dark side, that sometimes bubbles up to the surface –as, for example, during the Iran-Contra scandal. And therein lies a tale, a biography of deeds you won’t read on Wikipedia for a very long time, at the end of this preface.
A Lot of Blackwater Under the Bridge
It’s a basic historical fact that the US has shored up many Latin American dictatorships, but few details are generally known about how they do it. One practitioner who knows is Ambassador John Dimitri Negroponte, a veteran counter-insurgency expert going back to Operation Phoenix in the Vietnam War. He has held many high posts. Including Ambassador to Honduras 1981-1985, and US Ambassador to Iraq, 2004-2005...
Prof. Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research reveals how Negroponte fulfilled his assignment to defeat the Iraqi insurgency –and nearly managed to destroy Iraq as a nation as well. The recruitment of death squads is part of a well-established US military-intelligence agenda. There is a long and gruesome US history of covert funding and support of terror brigades and targeted assassinations going back to the Vietnam war...
The recruitment and training of terror brigades in both Iraq and Syria was modeled on the “ Salvador Option”, a “ terrorist model” of mass killings by US-sponsored death squads in Central America. It was first applied in El Salvador, in the heyday of resistance against the military dictatorship, resulting in an estimated 75,000 deaths.[7]
As Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980’s, Negroponte was the lynch pin between Washington and the US-sponsored death squads in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.
In April 2004, G.W. Bush hired him as “ the man for the job” to bring the “ Salvador Option” to Iraq and Syria. In the same month, Al-Qaida in Iraq, the precursor to ISIS, was formed.[8]
Chossudovsky cites a report in The Times Online, in Jan. 2005, that the Pentagon was looking at
forming hit squads of Kurdish and Shia fighters to target leaders of the Iraqi insurgency [Resistance] in a strategic shift borrowed from the American struggle against left-wing guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago.
Under the so-called “ El Salvador option”, Iraqi and American forces would be sent to kill or kidnap insurgency leaders, even in Syria, where some are thought to shelter.
Hit squads would be controversial and would probably be kept secret...
The Reagan Administration funded and trained teams of nationalist forces to neutralise Salvadorean rebel leaders and sympathisers. …
John Negroponte, the US Ambassador in Baghdad, had a front-row seat at the time as Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85. In the early 1980s, President Reagan’s Administration funded and helped to train Nicaraguan contras based in Honduras, with the aim of ousting Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime.
The Contras were equipped using money from illegal American arms sales to Iran, a scandal that could have toppled Mr. Reagan.
The thrust of the Pentagon proposal in Iraq …is to follow that model …[9]
But it gets worse. A lot worse. Chossudovsky notes:
While the stated objective of the “ Iraq Salvador Option” was to “ take out the insurgency,” in practice the US-sponsored terror brigades were involved in routine killings of civilians, with a view to fomenting sectarian violence. In turn, the CIA and MI6 were overseeing “ Al Qaeda in Iraq” units involved in targeted assassinations directed against the Shiite population... advised by undercover US Special Forces.
Robert Stephen Ford –subsequently appointed US Ambassador to Syria –was part of Negroponte’s team in Baghdad in 2004-2005. In January 2004, he was dispatched as U.S. representative to the Shiite city of Najaf, which was the stronghold of the Mahdi army [an important volunteer force loyal to the charismatic Shiite imam Muqtada al-Sadr], with which he made preliminary contacts.[10]
So they were stoking violence from both sides of the street. The Salvador Option is El Salvador squared, El Salvador on steroids. The primary objective is not just quelling the insurgency to seal a US victory; it is to take that violence and ramp it up into internecine warfare that will rip the country into three parts. This is divide and conquer with a vengeance, following a plan to subjugate Iraq that the Israeli strategist Oded Yinon laid out in the 1980’s, of which more later.
Supposedly the war on Iraq was part of the US “ war on terror.” Bush even made a lame attempt to link Saddam and Al Qaida to justify his war on Iraq (of course, Saddam’s regime was naturally trying to eradicate fundamentalist terrorism). Yet now the US was going to put Al Qaida into mass production.
The policy design was devastatingly simple. The Sunnis were to be punished because Saddam and much of his administration had been Sunni. This decapitated the country and gutted its military. A Shiite-leaning government was set up. The Sunni insurgency would direct its ire against this weak center, while the “ Sunni” terrorists of Al Qaida were unleashed against Shiite civilians. Ethnic cleansing would result, beginning the dissolution into three separate territories, Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish.
John Negroponte and Robert Stephen Ford were put in charge of recruiting the Iraqi death squads. While Negroponte coordinated the operation from his office at the US Embassy, Robert S. Ford, who was fluent in both Arabic and Turkish, was entrusted with the task of establishing strategic contacts with Shiite and Kurdish militia groups outside the “ Green Zone” .[11]
Chossudovsky quotes Dahr Jamail, the courageous, award-winning American journalist cited by Wikipedia as “ one of the few unembedded journalists to report extensively from Iraq during the 2003 Iraq invasion:”
Negroponte had assistance from his colleague from his days in Central America during the 1980’s, Ret. Col James Steele. Steele, whose title in Baghdad was Counselor for Iraqi Security Forces, supervised the selection and training of members of the Badr Organization [Badr Brigade] and Mehdi Army, the two largest Shi’ite militias in Iraq, in order to target the leadership and support networks of a primarily Sunni resistance. Planned or not, these death squads promptly spiraled out of control to become the leading cause of death in Iraq. Intentional or not, the scores of tortured, mutilated bodies which turn up on the streets of Baghdad each day are generated by the death squads whose impetus was John Negroponte. And it is this U.S.-backed sectarian violence which largely led to the hell-disaster that Iraq is today.[12]
Demographic warfare. This was the era when Shiite and Sunni mosques and neighborhoods were rocked by terror bombings, until the residents were forced to flee to areas where their sect was in the majority. This was when the famous incident occurred with the two British SAS special forces mercenaries, dressed in mufti and driving around Basra with detonators in their car, apparently planning to bomb a mosque or a market.[13] They were arrested by the Iraqi police. The British liberated them by driving an assault group of tanks through the walls of the jail. Interesting parallel: during “ the troubles” in Northern Ireland, the SAS was caught carrying out terror bombing provocations to stoke the sectarian civil war there. “
On May 4, 2006, Congressman Dennis Kucinich gave a speech on the floor of the House which linked the Bush administration to the death squads in Iraq.” Kucinich had written to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, citing copious references to newspaper articles. “ News reports over the past 10 months,” Kucinich told Congress, “ strongly suggest that the U.S. has trained and supported highly organized Iraqi commando brigades, and that some of those brigades have operated as death squads, abducting and assassinating thousands of Iraqis.” [14]
Here are a few of the congressman’s news highlights:
July 28, 2005 –Los Angeles Times reports that members of a California Army National Guard company, the Alpha Company, who were implicated in a detainee abuse scandal, trained and conducted joint operations with the Wolf Brigade, a commando unit criticized for human rights abuses. In an online Alpha Company newsletter, Captain Haviland wrote, “ We have assigned 2nd Platoon to help them transition, and install some of our ‘Killer Company’aggressive tactical spirit in them.’The article further states that despite the Wolf Brigade’s controversial reputation for human rights violations, it is regarded as the gold standard for Iraqi security forces by U.S. military officials.”
August 31, 2005 –BBC reports that on the night of August 24, a large force of the Volcano Brigade raided homes in Al-Hurriyah city in the Baghdad, kidnapping and then executing 76 citizens. The victims were all shot in the head after their hands and feet had been tied up. They suffered the harshest forms of torture, deformation and burning.
November 17, 2005 –Newsday reports that in the past year, the U.S. military has helped build up Iraqi commandos under guidance from James Steele, a former Army Special Forces officer who led U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in El Salvador in the 1980s. The brigades built up over the past year include the Lion Brigade, Scorpion Brigade and Volcano Brigade [the death squad cited in the previous article].
February 26, 2006 –The Independent reports that outgoing United Nations’human rights chief in Iraq, John Pace, revealed that hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by the death squads working from the Ministry of Interior. He said that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the Baghdad mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes.
March 9, 2006 –Los Angeles Times reports that ... U.S. trainers have also given extensive support to 27 brigades of heavily armed commandos accused of a series of abuses, including the death of 14 Sunni Arabs who were locked in an airtight van last summer.
March 10, 2006 –Sidney Morning Herald reports that men wearing the uniforms of U.S.-trained security forces, which are controlled by the Interior Ministry, abducted 50 people in a daylight raid on a security agency. Masked men who are driving what appear to be new government-owned vehicles are carrying out many of the raids.
March 27, 2006 –The Independent reports that while U.S. authorities have begun criticizing the Iraqi government over the “ death squads,” many of the paramilitary groups accused of the abuse, such as the Wolf Brigade, the Scorpion Brigade and the Special Police Commandos were set up with the help of the American military. Furthermore, the militiamen were provided with U.S. advisers some of whom were veterans of Latin American counter-insurgency which also had led to allegations of death squads at the time.[15]
Author Mike Whitney notes that “ the appearance of Colonel James Steele, as counselor for the Iraqi Security Forces, should remove any doubt about the real nature of America’s involvement... Steele’s ‘stock in trade’ is ‘spreading terror through the application of extreme violence’–Max Fuller’s apt description of US counterinsurgency campaigns in Latin America.”
About 160,000 US troops occupied Iraq, and the cost to Iraq so far, has been about 160,000 civilian lives. The troops were gradually replaced with mercenaries from Blackwater and other “ private security firms.” By the end of 2011, the US Army withdrew. It lost 4,400 men, cost $ 1 trillion,[16] and released thousands of veterans disabled by trauma into US society. They leave behind them a fractured, instable and radioactive Iraq. By 2013, civilian casualties were already on the rise again.[17]
Negroponte understudy Robert S. Ford, the No. 2 “ genius of genocide” who helped set up the Iraqi death squads, stayed in Baghdad until 2006. He was then assigned as ambassador to Algeria (another target for regime change) until 2008, when he returned to the Baghdad embassy as Deputy Head of Mission.[18] Ford was by then well prepared for his appointment as US Ambassador to Syria in January 2011, coinciding with the “ Arab Spring” disturbances by the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. In a scarce two months thereafter, the armed insurgency started in Syria. The “ military-industrial-media complex” was all geared up to present it as a spree of insane violence by President Assad against his own people.
From the very start, fighters, weapons and supplies were funneled over the border from Iraq and Turkey into Syria –including the vicious and extremist death squads of the LIFG, or Libyan Islamic Fighting group: fresh veterans of the Libya campaign, mercenaries of an Empire of Terror.[19] The US-trained veteran terrorist brigades began to commit atrocities against civilians, then post footage of the carnage on Youtube, and fix the blame on imaginary pro-government gangs –as if Assad himself had learned the tactics of counter-insurgency terror at the School of the Americas. Each time, the mass media would then join in a chorus of hysteria about the US “ responsibility to protect” civilians (so-called R2P) –the trick that had just worked to mobilize the extreme violence of NATO firepower to bring down Qaddafi and smash Libya. Russia and China learned their lesson, and vetoed NATO intervention in Syria at the UN.
Our lying, embedded media are acting as the purveyors of fakery, and the enablers of genocide. They are just as guilty as those who do the actual killing, because these war crimes could never happen without their protection. ***
Damascus holds a place of honor as the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city, and the third holiest city in Islam. Religious tolerance has deep roots in Syria. When the city surrendered peacefully to the Muslim siege in 634, the Orthodox Christians were treated benevolently by the new masters. The Koran considers Islam to be a continuation of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and ordains respect towards Christians and Jews as peoples with a holy scripture.[20]
When the Allies parceled out the Turkish empire after World War I, and the French got their mandate over Syria, they tried to divide and conquer the land by splitting it up into six ethno-religious enclaves. The Syrians, who are three-quarters Sunni, would have none of it. They have an ingrained suspicion of foreign conspiracies attempting to divide them along religious lines.[21] Some critics believe the imperialist aim is not regime change or balkanization, but “ merely” the destruction of a non-compliant nation. However, the Kurds, who are Sunni but not Arab, do have aspirations for more autonomy, and it was easy enough to use them to occupy Syria’s oil fields. So as we will see, the “ French option” is not off the table.
Terror attacks have been concentrated against Syria’s minorities, especially the Christians and the Alawites, Assad’s sect. The effect is to force them to flee as refugees, leaving a Sunni state that will be more susceptible to takeover by extremists, and to join the Sunni bloc of Gulf states allied with the US. In Iraq, the Christian population has now decreased by 80% or 90% from a figure of about 1.5 million in 2003.[22] As to who benefits, well, “ three’s a crowd.” Friendship between Muslims and Christians is the nemesis of Zionism (just as the world alliance between Christendom and Zionism is so fatal to the Muslim peoples.)
According to Chossudovsky in The Globalization of War,[23] the thesis of a “ Sunni belt” or bloc was spawned by Condoleeza Rice in 2006, ostensibly as a strategy to contain Iran. It was implemented by Prince Bandar “ Bush,” the Saudi spymaster, who went right to work creating the Jabhat al Nusra and ISIL / ISIS terror brigades. Saudi Arabia bankrolled the early years of the death squad campaign against Syria, providing financing and plausible deniability for the US effort.
Within days after Bandar organized a terror bombing against the high command of the Syrian military, in July 2012, he too was nearly killed by a bomb; many believe this was a revenge blow by Syrian military intelligence. That is one reason PM Erdogan of Turkey took the lead role in supporting the insurgency, but there is also the important logistical advantage: Turkey’s long border with Syria and Iraq. The bandits financed themselves and made Erdogan’s family rich by stealing Syria’s oil, which the Turks then sold to Israel. It is widely believed ISIS was able to loot $ 400 million from the central bank of Mosul, but Iraq has denied it. The UK Daily Mail reported on Iraq’s claim that ISIS is selling organs harvested from its victims to supplement its $ 2 million-a-day income from oil, ransom payments, and smuggled antiques.[24]
Takeaways
•Terrorist death squads in Iraq were created using the “ El Salvador Option” under cover of US Army counter-insurgency operations in the Iraq War. Ambassador Negroponte and Col. Steele, veterans of the Central American “ Contras” project, set up secret police death squads and freelance terror brigades on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide. The aim was to instigate a civil war along sectarian lines, as a divide-and-conquer strategy. ISIS (the “ Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” ) grew out of the “ Al Qaida” or “ Sunni” terror units they set up. In 2014, ISIS captured huge areas of Iraq, thanks to a stand-down by Iraqi army officers.
•In the “ Arab Spring” of March 2011, US “ human rights” NGO’s organized protests against the Syrian government, which worked as a screen for the death squad operations organized by Ambassador Ford. Terror brigades brought in from Iraq and Libya committed atrocities which were blamed on the government. Western nations supported them, claiming they were “ moderate” pro-democracy rebels. A huge army of mercenaries and extremists was recruited to fight the Syrian Army, paid for by Saudi money and the theft of Syrian oil. While the US and its allies pretended to fight their own terrorists, ISIS and its ilk grew stronger in Syria. On Sept. 30, 2015, Vladimir Putin changed the game by calling their bluff and carrying out massive airstrikes on ISIS, in coordination with the Syrian Army.
Eric King: Russia is dominating in Syria... and there’s really nothing Washington can do.
Paul Craig Roberts: No, except make a fool of itself by supporting ISIS. We brought ISIS in there —everybody knows that. Just the other day the former head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said on television that ‘Yes, we created ISIS and we used them as henchmen to overthrow governments.’(Laughter).[25] ***
It’s no fun for anyone to have to admit, “ My country: wrong and wrong!” However, the flip side of the freedoms we enjoy, is that burden of responsibility.
This short preface can’t tell very much of the story. It can only hope to help the sincere reader set aside natural skepticism, long enough to consider the unfamiliar evidence in the book. It is a strange tale indeed, and unfortunately, there is no way to expose monstrous deceptions without risking being thought a liar oneself.
I have tried here to open one fairly clear window, one reasonably straightforward thread of the narrative, leading from known points in our history (“ our” Central American death squad “ rebels” or “ Contras” ), to the unfamiliar and frightening territory of today’s terror bloodbath in the Middle East, in Paris, and beyond.
In this book are contributions from an array of authors, each with a unique perspective, yet arriving at similar conclusions: that ISIS was created intentionally, not by accidental “ blowback” [26] from misguided policies. Whether or not we convince you, I hope you will find our selections in some measure thought-provoking, stimulating and enlightening.
It’s a minority viewpoint, but we should remember –One good reason we have freedom of speech, is that Truth always starts from a minority viewpoint.
–John-Paul Leonard,
San Diego, Calif.,
December 2015
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