A joint report
published yesterday by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting
Program (OCCRP) and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN)
alleged that the Pentagon is supplying up to $2.2 billion worth
of Soviet-style arms and ammunition to Syrian rebels.
This may come as a shock to some, as President Donald Trump just announced in late July that he was ending a covert CIA program
that funded Syrian rebels, which seemed like a regime change for the
U.S. government. The CIA has been creating, arming, and funding
terrorists and rebels for a very long time. This isn’t new information,
but many had hoped that this practice would come to an end after Trump’s
latest decision.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon continues to
funnel record breaking amounts of weaponry into Syria. What’s worse, the
U.S. government is attempting to cover it up by allegedly falsifying
the paperwork.
OCCRP Report Reveals Pentagon’s Involvement in Syrian War
Through analyzing procurement records,
shipping information, official reports, leaked emails, and interviewing
insiders, the OCCRP and BIRN discovered how the Pentagon is fuelling the
Syrian war. Please keep in mind that this is entirely separate from the
CIA program Trump just ended that was funding Syrian rebels as well.
The report
states that the U.S. strategically uses “vaguely worded legal
documents” that makes it difficult to establish where the weapons
actually end up, which could potentially hinder efforts to stop arms
trafficking and “puts the Eastern European governments who sell the
weapons and ammunition at risk of breaching international law.”
Foreign Policy reported:
The program sidesteps long-established checks on international weapons trafficking, the report alleges, and appears to be turbocharging a shadowy world of Eastern European arms dealers. . . .
According to the report, many of the weapons suppliers — primarily in Eastern Europe but also in the former Soviet republics, including Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Ukraine — have both links to organized crime throughout Eastern Europe and spotty business records.
You can refer to the below diagram to
get a better understanding of how much the Pentagon is planning to
spend on arming Syrian rebels:
Although the reporters were able to
track down most of the purchases, one large purchase that was made — to
the tune of $479.6 million — specifies no end destination at all. The
reporters’ analysis of said purchase suggested that it will likely end
up in Syria, but it’s still strange that no end destination stated.
Part of the evidence suggesting that it
will end up in Syria lies in multiple contracts signed in September 2016
that originally cited Syria, but these references were deleted from
public record when the researchers contacted the Pentagon to ask about
them in March. When asked about this specific purchase, the Pentagon
refused to comment. The researchers did, however, make copies of both
the documents before and after the Pentagon altered them.
You can see the before and after documents below:
Balkan Insight,
which is hosting the original investigative report, explained: “Seven
US procurement documents were whitewashed to remove reference to ‘Syria’
after reporters contacted the Pentagon to enquire about whether the
exporting countries – Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia –
had been informed of the destination.”
Another issue this report and the Syrian
war in general helped to shed light on was the U.S. government’s change
in quality requirements for weaponry. Previously, the Pentagon required
suppliers to provide them with weapons that were no older than five
years old, but the U.S. recently changed these requirements given the
scarcity of supplies in the surrounding area.
These lower standards haven’t come
without a price, however. A Pentagon contractor died in 2015 from a
decades-old RPG exploding at a firing range in Bulgaria. The contractor
was supposed to train Syrian rebels, but died as a result of these
older, lower quality weapons. Not only is the U.S. still using older
weaponry, but they’re still using that same contractor involved in the
incident as well.
The Pentagon was also caught allegedly undermining the arms control systems. The report reads:
“In supplying the Syrian rebels, the Pentagon has used highly unusual
and misleading legal documentation that exploits a loophole in the
system designed to prevent diversions of arms to terrorists, embargoed
groups, or war criminals.”
A Deeper Look at U.S. Involvement in the Syrian War
The U.S. government played a role in
funding Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (previously known as ISIS), and
rebels in the past, and the government clearly has a vested interest in
the Syrian war given all of the misinformation it’s been spreading. This
was brought to light late last year when the Pentagon paid a PR firm over $500 million to create fake terrorists videos and when the White Helmets were caught staging and filming fake rescue scenes (you can watch a video on this here).
Another example was when President Trump
claimed there was a chemical weapons attack in Syria earlier this year,
and mainstream media was quick to paint it all over the news, when in
reality there was never any chemical weapons attack in Syria in April. It was simply a fabricated story perpetuated all over mainstream media (MSM). Higher-ups in the military and the CIA actually communicated this to Trump, yet he refused to listen to them and still launched 50 missiles at a Syrian military base.
Let’s not forget when North American MSM falsified data and reported that Russia bombed a hospital in Syria, when in reality that hospital still stands. The fake ‘al Quds hospital‘
news story was reported by CNN and PBS, stating that Russian airstrikes
took down the hospital in April 2015, killing innocent civilians — none
of which is true. In fact, Russia released satellite imagery proving
that the hospital was still standing later in the year.
Plus, you have the White Helmets,
a group posing as independently-funded aid-workers that MSM
praises but is, in reality, tied up with the very terrorists they claim
to stand against and funded by the West. Vanessa Beeley,
an independent researcher and journalist, explained the White Helmets
situation in the following statement: “What we are seeing here is an
eradication of Syrian state institutions and the implantation of a
Syrian shadow state by predominantly the UK and the US, but also
supported by EU governments.”
In other words, Beeley believes that the
White Helmets were created and funded by the West in order for them to
represent a shadow government on the grounds. Beeley states that the
White Helmets “are in fact multi-million funded, conservatively
speaking, a hundred million dollars, from the US – $23 million via
USAID; UK around $65 million; France is supplying equipment.”
There has been a heavy propaganda
campaign surrounding the Syrian war, one that North Americans have been
eating up and eagerly listening to via mainstream media and
the U.S. government. If you watch the media, you probably blame Assad
or the Islamic State for what’s going on, but who’s really to blame for
it?
The U.S. government certainly is in
part, because they’ve helped fuel the chaos on both ends by funding
Syrian rebels and selling weapons to the Islamic State. Congresswoman
Tulsi Gabbard even proposed a bill recently in an effort to put an end
to this government corruption, titled the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act,” which only received an alarming 13 supporters.
Gabbard was quoted as saying that the “CIA has also been funnelling weapons and money through
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and others who provide direct and indirect
support to groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. This support has allowed
al-Qaeda and their fellow terrorist organizations to establish
strongholds throughout Syria, including in Aleppo.”
Even Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke out about the Pentagon’s ties to terrorists, explaining:
In fact, many of the ISIS fighters and their commanders are ideological and organizational successors to the Jihadists that the CIA has been nurturing for 30 years. The CIA began arming and training the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in 1979 to fight the Soviets. Following the Soviet withdrawal, the CIA’s Afghan Mujahedeen became the Taliban while its foreign fighters, including Osama bin Laden, formed Al-Qaeda. In 2004, then British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that Al-Qaeda took its name—meaning “database” in Arabic—from the voluminous CIA database of Jihadists—Mujahedeen foreign fighters and arms smugglers trained and equipped by the CIA during the Afghan conflict.
