21st Century Wire – by Patrick Henningsen
The US fanfare surrounding Washington’s bombing raid over Syria was immense. WIth all the hype, you’d have thought that it was a new Pearl Harbor.
With a risk of popping President Obama and the US State Department’s bubble, we need to ask: did the US bomb a load of empty buildings in Syria on Tuesday?
According CNN Middle East correspondent Arwa Damon (photo, above), residents from the town of Raqqa, in northeastern Syria had “mixed reactions to US strikes”. The reason given was a real shocker:
Damon revealed on air early Wednesday that ISIL terrorists who were held up in the town may have been tipped off weeks in advance to the US airstrikes on Tuesday. According to Damon:
“15-20 days before the airstrikes, (ISIL) buildings were evacuated, and fighters then mixed in with the local population”.
Maybe Damon let the truth slip out by accident, or maybe she was trying to do what US journalists so often are not allowed to do by challenging Washington’s prefabricated narrative. Regardless, CNN’s chief war enthusiast Wolf Blitzer did not feel the need to pursue the point.
This surprising admission by CNN would mean that the US military may have only destroyed empty buildings in Raqqa, and that Washington’s inflated claims of dead ISIL fighters are probably exaggerated. In other words, it was all a big show, and ISIL’s capabilities were not degraded at all by Obama’s celebrated US blitzkrieg in Syria.
EMPTY BUILDINGS: CNN’s report suggest a hollow victory by US on Tuesday.
CENTCOM Has a Leak
If ISIS/ISIL operatives did indeed have advanced warning of US airstrikes in Syria – as this CNN report definitely suggests, then we also have to ask, where was the leak? The most likely source of a leak would be from US CENTCOM located in Doha, Qatar.
The other possibility is that ISIS/ISIL financial sponsors in Saudi Arabia and Qatar had received word of the coming US operation and were instructed to vacate any potential targets.
No Chance of Transparency
Many military experts have questioned the US airstrikes as ‘ineffective’ because targeting static venues will not deter ISIS/ISIL, and these latest revelations will only reinforce that skepticism.
So how much can the public trust US reports of its own bombing campaigns? As far as gathering and verifying intelligence goes, how can we know if US operatives knew who was where? Usually Washington can say anything and the mainstream press will not question it.
If you are a bona fide intelligence analysts, it can’t be easy – with political busy bodies and State Department geniuses revising their work, and then going back to the intelligence community asking for ‘authentification’ of various Tweets and ‘very chilling’ YouTube videos the White House has scraped-up off the web. As a result, assessments are often conflicting, and patchy – a running mess by anyone’s account.
Given that Washington DC has a diabolical no track record of being highly politicized when it comes to ‘intelligence’, it’s hard swallow anything coming out of Pennsylvania Ave.
At the end of the day, they tell us what they want us to hear.
“When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty.” – Philip Snowden (1916)
After we “liberate” these empty buildings, we’ll rebuild them and bomb them again.
yup!
http://bintel.com.ua/uploads/images/arabi-vesna/pers2_13_gas.jpg
January 27, 2011
http://iraqenergy.org/news/?detailof=1685&content=Syria-eyes-pipelines-through-Iraq
Syria eyes pipelines through Iraq
DAMASCUS, Syria, Damascus could invite investors to build oil and natural gas pipelines that would cross Syrian and Iraqi territory, the Syrian oil minister said.
A pipeline connecting Iraq and Syria through Kirkuk in northern Iraq to the Mediterranean port of Banias was closed in the 1970s because of political spats between the two countries. Opened again in 2000, the pipeline was shut down in 2003 after it was hit by U.S. airstrikes.
Baghdad wants to build and repair pipelines connected to its neighbors to handle the expected volumes of oil and natural gas under development in Iraq.
Most of Iraq’s oil heads through Turkish ports currently and there are plans to upgrade existing export arteries. In terms of Syria, officials said new pipelines have been on the table for years, but there was new momentum building in Baghdad, the Platts news service reports.
Syrian Oil Minister Sufian Alao told al-Thawra newspaper in Damascus that the pipeline to Iraq was under repair and there were plans to link to the South Pars gas field in Iran using an overland route from Iraq.
Syria doesn’t produce much natural gas and must rely on imports to meet demand.
“This surprising admission by CNN would mean that the US military may have only destroyed empty buildings in Raqqa, and that Washington’s inflated claims of dead ISIL fighters are probably exaggerated. In other words, it was all a big show,…”
Look at the bright side.
Now they know where they AREN’T.