Thread: Judicail Watch - The Real Benghazi Story

October 16, 2015: This Week's Headlines
The Real Benghazi Story


The infamous al Qaeda terrorist attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, took place on the evening of September 11, 2012, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith. Shortly afterward, a second assault on a nearby compound killed two CIA contractors, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty. Ten others were also injured in the attacks.

The lies and inaction by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice (who is now Obama's national security adviser) were monstrous. Rather than tell the truth, and risk political blowback for the Libya mess and the lack of security - the Obama administration abandoned those under fire and pretended the attack had nothing to do with terrorism.

Judicial Watch saw through the lies and began what has become the most nationally significant investigation ever by a non-governmental entity. Our Benghazi Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and subsequent dozen-plus FOIA lawsuits changed history. One of these lawsuits led to the disclosure of White House records confirming that top political operatives at the White House concocted the talking points used by Susan Rice to mislead the American people in order save Obama's reelection prospects.

These smoking-gun documents embarrassed all of Congress and forced Speaker John Boehner to appoint the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

And the pressure from our Benghazi litigation led to the disclosure of the Clinton email scandal, the historical ramifications of which we are now witnessing.

Hillary Clinton is scheduled to testify next week to the Select Committee. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the thanks-to-JW famous politician running the Committee, has steadfastly refused to talk to JW about what we've uncovered. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the leader of panel Democrats, also had no interest in learning about Judicial Watch's efforts.

We'll see what happens with Mrs. Clinton's testimony, but if the past is any indication of the future, the scene will shed more heat than light on the terrible scandal (and Mrs. Clinton's massive obstruction of its investigation).

As the Benghazi Select Committee has done little of note for the last year to educate the American people about a scandal that may be a key factor that led to the rise of ISIS (and our failing war against it), my colleagues and I have compiled what we believe to be each and every press release documenting our discoveries, actions, and updates from our Benghazi work. Please review this educational material and share with your friends and family, as much of this material deserves widespread attention and notice. This is a body of work that is a testament to the persistence, hard work and patriotic commitment of my JW colleagues. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the steadfast support of our members. The JW Benghazi list is below, in reverse chronological order:

2015

Sept. 17 Judicial Watch: State Department Asked Hillary Clinton to Delete Copies of Classified Benghazi Emails Four Months Ago

July 8 Judicial Watch: Secret Emails Show Hillary Clinton Tied To Benghazi Talking Points

June 29 Judicial Watch: Newly Released Documents Confirm White House Officials Set Hillary Clinton's Benghazi Response

May 26 Judicial Watch: State Department Almost Immediately Labeled Benghazi Attack as "Terrorism Event"

May 18 Judicial Watch: Defense, State Department Documents Reveal Obama Administration Knew that al Qaeda Terrorists Had Planned Benghazi Attack 10 Days in Advance

Feb. 26 Documents Obtained by Judicial Watch Reveal Top Hillary Clinton Advisers Knew Immediately that Assault on Benghazi was Armed Attack

Feb. 19 Judicial Watch Forces Obama Administration to Release Pentagon Benghazi Attack Documents

Jan. 26 Judicial Watch Obtains State Department DSCC Records on Terrorist Attack on Benghazi

2014

Dec. 11 Judicial Watch: State Department Documents Show Its Security Contractor Operating without a License in Benghazi on Day of Terrorist Attack

Sept. 17 Judicial Watch Statement on Special Select Committee on Benghazi

Sept 10 Documents Reveal State Department Officials Told Three Months before Attack thatBenghazi Security Guards Abandoning Posts Out of Fear for Safety

Sept. 10 Judicial Watch Announces Three New Lawsuits against Obama Administration for Records Relating to Benghazi Attack

June 5 Judicial Watch Sues Departments of Defense and State for Records about Benghazi Briefings of Congressional Leaders

May 6 Judicial Watch: Obama Administration Still Withholding Documents about Benghazi Attack

May 2 Judicial Watch Reacts to Speaker Boehner's Support for Select Committee on Benghazi

April 29 Judicial Watch: Benghazi Documents Point to White House on Misleading Talking Points

April 1 JW Obtains Documents Revealing Questionable Security Contracting in Benghazi

Feb. 5 Obama Administration Withholds Key Benghazi Emails

Jan. 6 Benghazi victims' families, conservative leaders demand Boehner create Select Committee

2013

Nov 18 Judicial Watch Obtains New Photos of Benghazi Attack Aftermath

Sept. 11 Judicial Watch Issues Special Report on Anniversary of Benghazi Massacre and Cover-Up

July 23 JW Sues Obama State Department for Talking Points and Updates Given to Susan Rice Related to Benghazi Attack

June 21 Judicial Watch Obtains First Photos from State Department Depicting Aftermath of Benghazi Attack

March 5 Judicial Watch Sues U.S. Department of State for Details on $400,000 Benghazi Security Contract

March 5 JW Sues Obama State Department for Benghazi Attack Videos and Photographs

Feb. 20 JW Sues Office of the Director of National Intelligence for Docs Describing Attack on U.S. Consulate in Benghazi

Jan. 22 JW Special Report: "The Benghazi Attack of September 11, 2012: Analysis and Further Questions"

https://mail.aol.com/webmail-std/en-us/suite

This is very heavy stuff and I hope the American people are paying attention!

Ambassadors are free to leave any country at any time. Anyone have a thought on why given the situation in Libya that the Ambassador, Chris Stevens, who is supposed be the one responsible for the Americans in Libya didn't evacuate and come home and instead fled to some outpost in Benghazi where he was followed and killed along with 3 other Americans trying to protect him?

If more troops or "security" were sent to Tripoli, would there have been more or less Americans murdered by the insurgents?

I think more.

This is not a defense of anyone in the Obama Administration, but something that has bothered me since the news of the killings. Why hadn't Stevens already ordered a total evacuation of Americans from Libya including himself and the tiny contingent protecting him?

Stevens, in his own remarks, arrived in Libya aboard a Greek ship to set up an operation in Benghazi, not Tripoli, to support the "New" government that would receive all of the Libyan frozen assets. He talks about interfacing with the different "factions" in the area. He was later named as the Ambassador and at that time would have located to Tripoli. .There are very interesting reports about all of this on a couple of World Socialist websites. Lots of speculation. Basically they all seem to agree that the US was arming what is now ISIS with Gaddafi's arsenal. The video of his remarks in 2011 is at the bottom. this is an article from Business Insider.

How US Ambassador Chris Stevens May Have Been Linked To Jihadist Rebels In Syria

• Michael B Kelley

• Oct. 19, 2012, 8:45 AM

The official position is that the U.S. has refused to allow heavy weapons into Syria.

But there's growing evidence that U.S. agents — particularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevens — were at least aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.

In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan opposition, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group — a group that has now disbanded, with some fighters reportedlyparticipating in the attack that took Stevens' life.

In November 2011 The Telegraph reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council, "met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey" in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria.

Last month The Times of London reported that a Libyan ship "carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria … has docked in Turkey." The shipment reportedly weighed 400 tons and includedSA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.

Those heavy weapons are most likely fromMuammar Gaddafi's stock of about 20,000 portable heat-seeking missiles—the bulk of them SA-7s—that the Libyan leader obtained from the former Eastern bloc. Reuters reports that Syrian rebels have been using those heavy weapons to shoot down Syrian helicopters and fighter jets.

The ship's captain was "a Libyan from Benghazi and the head of an organization called the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support," which was presumably established by the new government.

That means that Ambassador Stevens had only one person—Belhadj—between him and the Benghazi man who brought heavy weapons to Syria.

Furthermore, we know that jihadists are the best fighters in the Syrian opposition, but where did they come from?
Last week The Telegraph reported that an FSA commander called them "Libyans" when he explained that the FSA doesn't "want these extremist people here."

And if the new Libyan government was sending seasoned Islamic fighters and 400 tons ofheavy weapons to Syria through a port in southern Turkey—a deal brokered by Stevens' primary Libyan contact during the Libyan revolution—then the governments of Turkey and the U.S. surely knew about it.

Furthermore there was a CIA post in Benghazi, located 1.2 miles from the U.S. consulate, used as "a base for, among other things, collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles" ... and that its security features "were more advanced than those at [the] rented villa where Stevens died."

And we know that the CIA has been funneling weapons to the rebels in southern Turkey. The question is whether the CIA has been involved in handing out the heavy weapons from Libya.

In any case, the connection between Benghazi and Syrian rebels is stronger than has been officially acknowledged.

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-sy...#ixzz29lfi4OSQ


U.S. Envoy Chris Stevens Delivers Remarks on the Situation in Libya


<font color="#000000"><span style="font-family: Roboto">

U.S. Department of State

Uploaded on Aug 4, 2011
U.S. Envoy to Libya Chris Stevens delivers remarks on the situation in Libya, on August 2, 2011. [Go tohttp://www.state.gov/video for more video and text transcript.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC2Nk66uR74

Like him or not, Glenn Beck was right about the Caliphate. This was his tke on it in 2012.
Glenn was right, Libya edition: stunning new report
by Wilson Friday, Oct 19, 2012 at 1:55 PM EDT

The BlazeTV video at the link.

Just a few days after the Benghazi attacks Glenn called out the administration’s phony youtube theory and posited one of his own. That theory was that Chris Stevens was overseeing the efforts by the administration to arm the rebels fighting Ghaddafi. Glenn goes over the Business Insider report showing there is ‘growing evidence’ that suggests Amb. Stevens was at least aware of heavy weapons being moved to rebel forces.

“The president is out on the stump speech right now saying that he’s really decimated Al‑Qaeda, but if you go back to when we went into Libya, again the New York Times was reporting that we may be arming the wrong people. We may actually be arming Al‑Qaeda. Do you remember that happening during the Arab Spring?” Glenn said.

“They said we were arming Al‑Qaeda. The White House denied it. My speculation was right after the September 11th attacks that not only was this an attack by rebels, this wasn’t due to a video, this was due to the fact that Christopher Stevens was the gun‑runner. He was the guy brokering the deals with Al‑Qaeda‑related affiliates. That was my speculation.”

Now what has the Business Insider found? Their report is below:

The official position is that the US has refused to allow heavy weapons into Syria. But there’s growing evidence that U.S. agents—particularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevens—were at least aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.

In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan opposition, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group—a group that has now disbanded, with some fighters reportedly participating in the attack that took Stevens’ life.

In November 2011 The Telegraph reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council, “met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey” in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria.

Last month The Times of London reported that a Libyan ship “carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria … has docked in Turkey.” The shipment reportedly weighed 400 tons and included SA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.

Those heavy weapons are most likely from Muammar Gaddafi’s stock of about 20,000 portable heat-seeking missiles—the bulk of them SA-7s—that the Libyan leader obtained from the former Eastern bloc. Reuters reports that Syrian rebels have been using those heavy weapons to shoot down Syrian helicopters and fighter jets.

The ship’s captain was “a Libyan from Benghazi and the head of an organization called the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support,” which was presumably established by the new government.

That means that Ambassador Stevens had only one person—Belhadj—between himself and the Benghazi man who brought heavy weapons to Syria.

Furthermore, we know that jihadists are the best fighters in the Syrian opposition, but where did they come from?

Last week The Telegraph reported that a FSA commander called them “Libyans” when he explained that the FSA doesn’t “want these extremist people here.”

And if the new Libyan government was sending seasoned Islamic fighters and 400 tons of heavy weapons to Syria through a port in southern Turkey—a deal brokered by Stevens’ primary Libyan contact during the Libyan revolution—then the governments of Turkey and the U.S. surely knew about it.

Furthermore there was a CIA post in Benghazi, located 1.2 miles from the U.S. consulate, used as “a base for, among other things, collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles” … and that its security features “were more advanced than those at rented villa where Stevens died.”

And we know that the CIA has been funneling weapons to the rebels in southern Turkey. The question is whether the CIA has been involved in handing out heavy weapons from Libya.

In any case, the connection between Benghazi and the rise of jihadists in Syria is stronger than has been officially acknowledged.

“You follow this? The guy we worked with is the guy doing these deals. Our ally Turkey is ‑‑ knows all about it. Our ally, the prime minister, who’s the best friend of Barack Obama? Who’s the one he was the first one to call? He didn’t call, not Tony Blair, he didn’t call Gordan Brown. He didn’t call anybody. The first guy he called was Turkey’s leader. He’s the closest to Turkey’s leader,”

Glenn said. “Turkey is taking the arms from Libya and shipping them into Syria. Reuters also reports that satellite photos exposed a CIA post in Benghazi located 1.2 miles from the consulate. It was used as a base, among other things, for collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from the Libyan government, including surface‑to‑air missiles. And that its security features were more advanced than those at the rented villa where Stevens died. We also know that a dozen CIA operatives and contractors left the Benghazi base after it was exposed. Could the two CIA groups be connected as a start‑and‑end points to help funnel heavy weapons to the Syrian opposition. The answer is yes. We know that the CIA has been funneling weapons to the rebels in southern Turkey. CNN reports that FSA members are cutting their own deals to get weapons from well‑armed extremists.”

“So it raises questions on who the CIA is arming. We also know that U.S. weapons are now ending up in the hands of hardline Islamists in Syria. It turns out that many of the jihadists are the same ones, the same people that Stevens helped arm to topple Muammar Gaddafi.”

“Now here we go. Who was he having dinner with? On September 11th. September 11th he was having a meeting with the Turkish ambassador, the guy who’s involved in the gun‑runnings. He’s having dinner and he leaves from dinner 40 minutes early. The consulate is surrounded and he dies. Eerie coincidence? I think not. This is the truth of what happened in Benghazi.”

Source: http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/10/19/glenn-was-right-libya-edition-stunning-new-report/?utm_source=glennbeck&utm_medium=contentcopy_link

World Socialists weigh in;

More questions than answers after US commandos seize Benghazi attack suspect

By Patrick Martin
19 June 2014

The Pentagon announced Tuesday that Special Forces commandos had seized Ahmed Abu Khattala, a Libyan citizen and resident of Benghazi, and transported him to a US Navy ship in the Mediterranean, where he is undergoing interrogation by a team of FBI and military intelligence investigators.

At the same time, the US Justice Department made public a secret indictment of Khattala, charging him with three counts of involvement in the September 11, 2012 attacks on a US mission and a nearby CIA annex in Benghazi in which four Americans died, including US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. One of the charges will be “killing a person in the course of an attack on a federal facility,” which could carry the death penalty.

The prisoner will be brought to the United States, officials said, to stand trial before a federal court. The Obama administration rebuffed calls by congressional Republicans for Khattala to be jailed at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp and tried before a military tribunal.

While media apologists for Obama have suggested that his reliance on the FBI and federal courts marked a significant departure from the policies of the Bush administration, Sunday’s raid in Libya was as gross a violation of international law as any CIA rendition. The FBI has no jurisdiction in Libya, which is a sovereign state, and the US is not at war with Libya, so the actions of the Delta Force commandos are equally lawless.

The Libyan government—placed in power by the US-NATO war that overthrew the Gaddafi regime in 2011—immediately denounced the American kidnapping of one of its citizens, demanding that Khattala be returned to his own country.

This is the second such US commando raid on a Libyan city, following the abduction of Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known as Anas al-Libi, from Tripoli, the capital city, last October. Ruqai is currently in prison in New York awaiting trial on charges related to the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

A US official who briefed the press under condition of anonymity emphasized that the Libyan government was not informed of the raid in Benghazi and did not give its approval. “I am not going to get into the specifics of our diplomatic discussions,” the official said, “but to be clear: This was a unilateral U.S. operation.”

Virtually every aspect of the Khattala affair is murky, in keeping with the curtain of lies and distortions that surround the Benghazi attacks, in both the accounts offered by the Obama administration and the increasingly strident denunciations coming from Obama’s critics in the Republican Party.

While Obama issued a statement hailing the detention of Khattala and saluting the bravery of the Delta Force commandos who captured him near Benghazi, there is no indication that the Islamist militant was in hiding, or that he offered any resistance.

Khattala apparently was living in his own home in the el-Leithi neighborhood of Benghazi, where he worked full-time as a building contractor, while moonlighting as the leader of a small militia band—estimated at no more than two dozen men—one of thousands of such micro-groups that have sprung up in Libya since the ouster of Gaddafi.

Western reporters interviewed him on several occasions, portraying him as a local eccentric who had been on the scene at the time of the 2012 attacks on the US mission and CIA annex, but who denied any active or leading role.

The New York Times published an interview with Khattala on October 18, 2012, only a month after the attack. CNN ran an audio interview with him in May 2013 (he declined to go on camera), sitting down with Khattala for two hours at a local café. The Times followed up with a detailed profile as part of a feature report on the Benghazi attack published December 29, 2013.

In other words, this was not Osama bin Laden hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, changing locations constantly to avoid detection. He told his CNN interviewer, Arwa Damon, that he had not been contacted by any Libyan or American officials despite being an eyewitness to some of the events of September 11, 2012. “Even the investigative team did not try to contact me,” he told Damon, referring to the FBI.

In its report on Khattala’s capture and removal from Libya, the Times wrote: “Khattala is a local, small-time Islamist militant.

He has no known connections to international terrorist groups, say American officials briefed on the criminal investigation and intelligence reporting, and other Benghazi Islamists and militia leaders who have known him for many years.”

This did not stop the Obama administration from portraying his arrest in near-apocalyptic terms, as a tremendous blow against terrorism and proof that, as Obama put it, “With this operation, the United States has once again demonstrated that we will do whatever it takes to see that justice is done when people harm Americans.”

The timing of the arrest of Khattala raises a number of questions. Given his lack of concealment in Benghazi, and the fact that he was not protected by a substantial armed force, if any, it seems likely that US special forces could have seized him more or less at will. As CNN noted, he was “really not that difficult to find.”

The arrest provided a blast of favorable publicity for the Obama administration in the midst of the debacle in Iraq, and it also served as response to the empaneling of a select committee by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to conduct yet another investigation into the 2012 events in Benghazi, which have become a near-obsession of the US ultra-right.

The seizure of Khattala coincided with military moves on the ground in Benghazi, as the forces of the US-backed general Khalifa al-Hiftar launched attacks on Ansar al-Shariah, the powerful militia that dominates much of eastern Libya and has been accused by the US government of responsibility for the Benghazi attacks.

On Sunday, during the hours before the commando raid that captured Khattala, at least 57 people were killed and 72 wounded in fighting around Benghazi, according to a report in the Libyan Herald. This suggests that the Delta Force operation was coordinated with the forces of Hiftar, a former general under Gaddafi who went into exile and lived for several decades in Langley, Virginia, where the CIA is headquartered.

What the Obama administration, its Republican critics, and the corporate-controlled US media all seek to conceal about the Benghazi affair is that Ambassador Stevens was apparently killed by the same Islamic militants that the US had used as its shock troops against Gaddafi and which the CIA was then engaged in redeploying to Syria to join the Islamic insurgency against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

In this connection, it must be pointed out that the CIA “annex” in Benghazi was actually the main US government operation in the city, while the US mission, manned by a handful of State Department officers, was strictly window dressing. The real business of US imperialism in eastern Libya—mobilizing Islamist fighters for transport to Syria, along with extensive supplies of weapons seized from Gaddafi’s arsenals—was run by the intelligence agency.

That is why the “annex” could be successfully defended against attack—it was heavily fortified and had heavily armed US mercenaries for security—while the mission was left in the hands of hired Libyan guards who fled as soon as an angry crowd began forming outside.

In other words, Benghazi is another episode of blowback from the cynical maneuvers of US imperialism in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, in which Al Qaeda was first created with the assistance of the CIA in Afghanistan, then demonized after 9/11 as the pretext for US military interventions, and subsequently recruited as US proxy forces in wars for regime change in Libya and Syria.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/201.../beng-j19.html

Always good to look outside of the main media to see what other factions are saying. This is from the World Socialist website.

Hillary Clinton’s “democracy” for Syria

7 November 2012

US imperialism has a long and sordid record of bloody military interventions and interference in the affairs of other countries for the purpose of securing the interests of Wall Street and corporate America.

Ever since William Howard Taft declared that “our little brown brothers” of the Philippines would need “50 to 100 years of close supervision” to develop functioning self-government, these interventions have been justified with assertions of Washington’s unique role in bringing democracy to less fortunate peoples of the world, generally at the point of a gun.
Seldom, however, has this pretense been proclaimed so shamelessly as in the announcement last week by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Washington had decided to appoint a new leadership for the “Syrian revolution.”

Clinton unceremoniously dismissed the former leadership, the Syrian National Council, a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated outfit that Washington had proclaimed little more than a year ago as the “legitimate representative” of the Syrian people. Now she says they are just a bunch of out-of-touch exiles who haven’t set foot in Syria for decades.

The problem is, Clinton declared, the SNC is insufficiently representative of the Syrian people. So the US State Department has handpicked a new group of individuals and organizations that is to form the basis of a transitional government. “We have recommended names and organizations that we believe should be included in any leadership structure,” Clinton told a press conference in Zagreb, Croatia on October 31.

Here one has a text-book example of democracy “made in the USA,” or, more precisely, neocolonialism.

To qualify for inclusion in Washington’s handpicked roster of “representative” leaders, one must “be on record strongly resisting the efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution,” Clinton decreed.

The aim is clear. The State Department wants a “respectable” face for the grisly conflict that Washington has fomented in Syria, elevating the pro-US businessman Riad Seif and similar figures as a government in waiting, even as the fighting is being carried out more and more by Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias receiving covert US backing.

When it comes to hijacking dissent, however, no one can compete with Washington. This is precisely what it has done in Syria, just as it did earlier in Libya.

Having seen two of its longest-standing and most trusted stooges in the region—Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak—toppled by uprisings of the working masses, Washington decided to seize the initiative by using the “Arab Spring” as a cover for promoting regime-change.

First in Libya, it exploited popular protests and a trumped-up claim that the population of Benghazi was in imminent danger of annihilation as the pretext for launching a US-NATO war to topple Muammar Gaddafi. Now, in Syria, it has helped turn similar protests into a vicious sectarian civil war through which it seeks the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.

In Syria, US imperialism has relied more heavily on proxy forces, including Islamist foreign fighters, which have been aided and armed by US allies in the region, principally Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with the CIA orchestrating the operation from a newly created station in southern Turkey.

This is by no means the first time that Washington has attempted to install a government of its own choosing in Damascus, in contempt of the aspirations and rights of the Syrian people. For nearly a decade, from 1949 to 1958, the CIA waged a non-stop campaign to instigate, finance and support right-wing coup plots aimed at bringing to power a regime subordinate to US interests.

Beginning in 1948, CIA operatives plotted with Syrian Army Chief of Staff Col. Husni Zaim, described by the agency in declassified documents as a “‘Banana Republic’ dictator type,” to bring to power an anti-communist military dictatorship.
On March 30, 1949, Zaim carried out his coup and proceeded to enact Washington’s agenda, rounding up left-wing and nationalist forces, signing an armistice with Israel, and approving a pipeline deal with the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO).

Barely nine months later, however, Zaim was himself ousted in another coup. In the early 1950s, this process was repeated, with a more nationalist government being overthrown by a US-backed right-wing officer, only to see a countercoup topple Washington’s man.

Then followed Operation Straggle and Operation Wappen, with the CIA collaborating with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in assassinations and coup plots involving right-wing officers and politicians as well as Islamist forces. By 1957, the US nearly provoked World War Three over Syria, sending the Sixth Fleet to its shores, deploying warplanes in Turkey, convincing the Turkish government to mass 50,000 troops on Syria’s border, and placing the Strategic Air Command on high alert.

During this period, President Eisenhower justified US intervention by describing Syria as a country “ripe to be plucked at any time,” while accusing Moscow of attempting to do the same thing as Washington.

Once again, Washington views Syria as a country “ripe to be plucked” and has unleashed a bloodbath against the Syrian people to that end. Its aims have nothing to do with “democracy” or “human rights,” but are bound up, just as they were more than half a century ago, with asserting US hegemony in the energy-rich and geo-strategically vital region of the Middle East and advancing the interests of America’s financial and corporate oligarchy. Once again, this intervention carries with it the threat of a far wider war.

One thing that distinguishes the present US intervention in Syria from those carried out in the 1950s is the support it has received from a whole layer of pseudo-left organizations, from the International Socialist Organization in the US, to the New Anti-capitalist Party in France, to the Socialist Workers Party in Britain. Their unique contribution has been to cast the sectarian civil war as a “revolution” and portray imperialist intervention as a justifiable means of advancing human progress.
Hillary Clinton’s brazen statements and Washington’s cobbling together of a new leadership for this “revolution” at a luxury hotel in Doha have served to expose the real role of these organizations, which have integrated themselves directly into the operations of US imperialism, serving as willing stooges of the State Department.

The reality is that the working people of Syria and the entire Middle East can advance their interests only through a relentless struggle against imperialism, which is intervening through Hillary Clinton’s Doha “revolutionaries” and the Islamist gangs armed by Washington and its allies.

Settling accounts with the Assad regime in Syria, just as with the US-backed dictatorships and monarchies in the region, is the task of the working class, which must be mobilized and united across all religious and ethnic lines on the basis of an internationalist and socialist program.

Bill Van Auken
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/11/pers-n07.html