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As bombs start dropping in Syria and Iraq, the world is once again being asked to cower in fear of a shadowy terror group that most people hadn’t heard of just a few months ago. But even the most cursory examination of ISIS’s past, its connections, and the actors populating it reveal a very different story than the one we are being asked to believe in. Fake terrorists. Foreign backers. False flags. Meet the new boogeyman, same as the old boogeyman.

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TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:

JAMES CORBETT: Welcome back ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to the Corbett Report podcast. I’m your host James Corbett as always coming to you from the sunny climes of Western Japan here on this 25th day of September 2014.

Welcome to Episode 295 of this podcast – ‘Who is really behind ISIS?’, and this is an interesting question for, I think, most of the people on the globe right now because of course ISIS is the ostensible reason behind the airstrikes we see going on in Syria as we speak, led of course by the United States but including a coalition of allies, and a seemingly expanding coalition, with rhetoric heating up in just about every Western nation on the planet as the fear-mongers go into absolute overdrive about this shadowy terror group on the other side of the planet that most people in the world, or at least most people in the western world, hadn’t heard of at all just a few months ago but now is the big boogeyman behind everything.

So it is in our best interests to find out what is really going on, and in good Corbett Report style we’re going to do so by really examining and drilling deep, deeper than I think I’ve seen any of the other sources online going, and dredging up some pretty surprising details from the history of this group, this very shadowy organization that, well it should not surprise anyone I think in the Corbett Report crowd, tends to source back to some pretty surprising places, some pretty familiar places let’s put it that way.

So in order to start this investigation let’s take a look once again, we have a slide show presentation so for the benefit of the video viewers out there. The video presentation we’re about to present today is ‘Who is really behind ISIS’, and in this presentation we’re going to deconstruct the terror script which is playing out right now and which, as we’ve mentioned a few times in the preceding weeks, tends to culminate every year around September, culminating around the time of the September 11th anniversary and the few weeks afterwards before petering out in October/November. Let’s hope that’s all that’s playing out at the moment.

We’re going to outline the history of ISIS. We’re going to expose some of the main actors behind this group. We’re going to detail the funding and aid to ISIS from various organizations. We’re going to debunk some of the faulty information that’s out there, and of course we’re going to answer the question “Who is behind ISIS?”.

Let’s start by establishing the groundwork for this episode. Why is this important? Why should we be concerned about the goings-on of this group that, again, is on the other side of the planet that most people hadn’t heard of before and that, more likely than not, most people won’t care about again after a week or two of airstrikes? So let’s find out the basis for this and what and why we’re being told we should care so much about this group and of course in order to do that why don’t we turn to the fear-mongers themselves to allow them to explain what is really behind this fearsome group.

“ISIS, an al-Qaeda-bred terrorist group spreading its wings online. Savvier than its predecessors with a new array of tricks up its sleeves. Twitter has become a virtual second home for the terrorists but as many as 27000 accounts established just over the last two weeks, after ISIS posted a video capturing the beheading of US journalist James Foley with a reported 60000 accounts popping up since May.”

(Source: Hashtag Terror: Twitter struggles to clamp down on ISIS supporters online | Time Reference: 03:30)

“Douglas MacArthur McCain, a young American, killed while fighting with the terrorist group ISIS. US officials say they believe he died in Syria. He’s thought to have been killed in a battle between rival extremist groups near the city of Aleppo according to a human rights group. McCain’s uncle telling CNN his death occurred this past weekend.

This ratches up concerns about Americans involved with ISIS because now you have a confirmed example of an American killed fighting with ISIS in Syria. The worry is that this is somebody who’s become a trained killer.”

(Source: Other Americans already within ISIS ranks | Time Reference: 03:55)

ZAKARIA RAAD: “Hello my brothers in Australia. I don’t see myself better than any of yous, (inaudible) only that Allah has bring Karim on me and has brang me here to this country.

Two men who identify themselves as Australian appear in a recruitment video called ‘There is no life without jihad’. It’s believed up to 150 Australians have joined rebels fighting in Iraq and Syria.”

(Source: ‘Australian brothers’ call in ISIS video (video no longer online) | Time Reference: 04:26)

DAVID CAMERON: “Earlier today the Home Secretary confirmed that the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center has increased the threat level in the United Kingdom from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’. This is the first time in three years that the threat to our country has been at this level.”

(Source: David Cameron FULL Press Conference: UK Raises Terror Threat Level to ‘SEVERE’ | Time Reference: 04:48)

“I hate to disturb your Saturday night but ISIS is coming to America and it may be sooner than anyone thinks. They are rich. They are ruthless and they are suicidal.”

(Source: Still Report #316 – ISIS Threatens Mall in Charlotte, NC | Time Reference: 05:04)

“Since Western fighters joined ISIS they consider their home country as infidels. If they have a chance they will carry out attacks because they think of it as an infidel country and it should be fought.”

(Source: ISIS defector speaks to CNN | Time Reference: 05:18)

“They’re beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded. Oh this is beyond anything we’ve seen so we must prepare for everything and the only way you do that is you take a cold steely hard look at it and get ready.”

(Source: Hagel: ISIS threat is ‘beyond anything we’ve seen’ | Time Reference: 05:31)

Yes as the usual gaggle of fear-mongers in government and the mainstream media will no doubt tell you “Yes ISIS is coming and you’d better be afraid in fact the only thing you can do is take a cold steely hard look at it and get ready because apparently there’s really nothing that can be done to avoid whatever horrible, horrific, 911-like attack they’re planning on the US Heartland, or so we’re being told.

But again I think it behooves us to question this constant call for fear-mongering from the same fear-mongers who have, for years and years, ratcheted up these phony terror level alerts, to suit their geopolitical aims, and I think, once again that’s exactly what we see going on here. Rather than being scared of all of these foreign jihadis that are flocking to Syria then threatening to come back home to roost. I think we should probably be investing more of our time in understanding this threat, de-masking the boogeyman and showing who are the real terrorists in this situation. Something that’s not very difficult to do and again can be done through an open-source investigation exactly like what is taking place once again on corbettreport.com.

So for those of you who don’t know, earlier, I believe last month I posted up an article Who is ISIS? an open-source investigation which has so far accrued over 76 comments where dozens of users from all around the world have joined in, accumulating information and amassing information on this group.

A lot of the information that I’m going to go through today sources from this article or from the comments on this article so I would suggest you go and take a look at that. It’s a valuable source of information and in fact there’s more information in there than I could possibly cram into one podcast episode so it’s definitely worth looking at and joining in the conversation. If you are a Corbett Report subscriber of course you can log in and leave your own comments on that article or any other post to the website.

So let’s start delving into this question of ‘Who is ISIS?’ by first describing what is the Islamic State, which of course is now what ISIS is known as.

Basically of course this group was created in Iraq by a Jordanian Sunni back in 1999. It was formerly the official al-Qaeda franchendise, (franchise sorry – frankenstein..:) franchise in Iraq since it broke with al-Qaeda ideologically. It is now a self-proclaimed caliphate, which was pronounced in late June of this year, and the caliphate itself..well we’ll come to that in a moment. The question of the name of this group is something that gets bandied about and ISIS is often used as the short abbreviation in English, as it is being used in this presentation, but I don’t think we should put very much focus, attention, energy or interest into decoding that name specifically because of course it is just an acronym of an English translation of one of the group’s names. It is not particularly significant in and of itself and in fact it’s just one of many, many, many, many names that this group has gone by over the years.

You can go back to 1999 for example to the original organization which brought with it of course an Arabic name that I won’t attempt to butcher here who’s acronym was JTJ and who’s English translation was ‘The Organization of Monotheism and Jihad’.

It changed its name in 2004 to, again, another Arabic name that I won’t do the disservice of trying to mispronounce – ‘The Organization of Jihad’s Base in the Country of the Two Rivers’, although it became more commonly known as ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ or AQI around that time.

Then in 2006 it became the ‘Islamic State of Iraq’. In 2013 it became the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ or ‘Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham’, aka ISL and ISIS. Then in 2014 ‘Islamic State’.

But again all of these are anglicisations, and acronyms of anglicisations at that, so these are not accurate reflections of anything that this group would be known by in the Middle East and of course there are I suppose Arabic equivalents of this. I understand that the Arabic equivalent of ISIS or ISIL would be Daesh, I don’t know how to pronounce that but apparently that’s a shortening of the Arabic version of the group’s name that is somewhat perjorative to the extent that apparently the group goes around persecuting those who use that term to refer to the group, so again, what’s in a name?

Not that much in the case of an organization like this and also not so much in the case of the characters behind this organisation which we’ll get into in a moment.

First of all a map, again for those of you watching the video of this presentation instead of listening to the audio I have a map on the screen here. This is about the clearest map that I can find of what the Islamic State actually declares its caliphate to be. It’s remarkably unclear exactly what they’re claiming to to actually encompass but it’s something like this and this map shows of course Syria and Iraq and this shows about one-fifth perhaps of the landmass of Syria and Iraq covered in this black color, indicating territory claimed by the Islamic state, from Aleppo in the west of Syria, stretching across the northeastern section of Syria but not including the very northeastern tip of Syria, right to the Iraq border and then across the Iraq border, as far east as Tekrit and then even further south of Baghdad.

So that’s the general area that’s laid claim to but to what extent that area is actually under the control of this group etc is I think remarkably unclear. I think this is somewhat aspirational but at any rate this is supposedly the area that the Islamic state has declared as the boundaries of its caliphate, as of June of this year.

So switching to the question of who is behind this group, some of the characters behind it. It was founded in 1999 by a Jordanian Sunni Muslim who went by the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi although once again I think what’s in a name, not so much when it comes to any of these characters who populate this group. Once again I think we have to keep in mind that the names of the various jihadis behind this, like most jihadis they adopt ‘nommes de guerre’ that is ‘war names’ so these names are not necessarily their real names and in fact in most cases are specifically not their real names. They’re usually chosen for some sort of symbolic or historical cultural value so for example there’s no need to scratch your head and wonder why so many people are named Al Baghdadi, it’s because they are adopting a name that shows they’re the ‘Baghdadis’ – they’re from Iraq, that kind of thing. So, again, don’t read too much into any of these names, and there are usually many, many, many other alias names that these people go by as well so it gets extremely confusing, probably on purpose I think, for a number of reasons, I mean they may have – the terrorists may have – their reasons for it. I think the people controlling the terrorists also have reasons for having extremely confusing ways of referring to these people and multiple ways of referring so that if one of their memes or ideas or stories gets out of control they can spin them off as a completely different human being.

Something that we’ll come back to, it sounds strange but we’ll come to in a moment when we start actually examining these characters. So again, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi founded this group supposedly in 1999 in Iraq. A Sunni militant from Jordan and he had what can only be described as a remarkable career that brought with it many lives apparently. So, again this all sources from mainstream reporting. None of this is, you know ‘conspiracy’ reporting, this is all from mainstream news services, ABC and NBC and CBS and Reuters and all of those kinds of outlets, and they will all be linked up in the shownotes so you can go and read through all of these miraculous dealings of Zarqawi and his cohorts.

For example back in 2003 it was reported that Zarqawi was killed in a bombing raid in Iraq, but in 2004 it was also reported that he was arrested in Fallujah so apparently miraculously resurrected from the dead and then arrested. Then in 2005, without reports in the meantime indicating how or when or why he was released from – or escaped from – custody in Fallujah, or how he was never arrested in Fallujah in the first place he was arrested again in Baquba. Then later in 2005 he was reported as being evacuated from Iraq altogether. By whom and to where I’m not exactly certain, but at any rate he was evacuated from Iraq, supposedly, but then in 2005 he was reported as being killed in fighting in Iraq once again and then in 2006 he was killed in fighting once again! Presumably for the last time this time.

So killed at least three times – quite an amazing career one would have to admit, and as crazy as all of these reports are–and I think, again, this is just part of the modus operandi of this current instantiation of ‘the war on the boogeyman’ ie. ‘the war on terror’–is that they will throw out a number of names, they will throw out a number of reports saying this person was killed here, this person was killed there. Sometimes those reports are quietly retracted later, sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes these characters just go on to keep fighting, even after being reported killed, like Zarqawi.

But it gets even stranger. Back in 2006 the Washington Post published an article entitled ‘Military plays up role of Zarqawi‘ in which they reported:

“The US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program”

and that same article went on to say:

“One internal briefing produced by the US military headquarters in Iraq said that Kimmitt (one of the generals that oversaw this program) had concluded that the Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date”

So these, once again the Washington Post got its hands on internal briefing documents that the Pentagon was using, to talk about al-Qaeda in Iraq and their propaganda campaign in Iraq, and these documents prove that the Pentagon was absolutely 100 percent, self-consciously engaged in a PSYOP operation to make Zarqawi and al-Qaeda in Iraq seem more important than it was, and they have their own twisted internal logic that was reported on at the time as to why they wanted to do this and why they wanted to build up AQi in the minds of the Iraqi people and the people of the United States. And of course I think obviously the main part of that was to keep the American people involved and interested in keeping their troops in harm’s way there in Iraq, even long after Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’, “Well oh look there’s al-Qaeda in Iraq we have to be there” and there’s this character Zarqawi that the military was involved in pumping up so again this is just insane, it’s insanity.

The precursor of the current ISIS group, the leader with actually a ,not a PSYOP creation per se but at any rate someone who is blown up specifically on purpose made to seem more important than he was, because of the Pentagon. And it gets even stranger than that when we look at the person who took over from Zarqawi after his final, supposedly, reported death in 2006, someone going by the name of Baghdadi, one of many people going by the name of Baghdadi, this one Abu Omar al-Baghdadi but again it’s a nom de guerre, it’s not his real name. Apparently his real name is Hamid Dawud Mohamed Khalil al-Zawi, he’s also known as Abu Omar al-Qurashi al-Baghdadi and Abu Hamza al-Baghdadi so I would not, again, put too much faith, stock, interest or energy into parsing these various names, just to know that this is someone who is referred to as al-Baghdadi and who took over from al-Zarqawi as leader of what was at the time ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ in 2006.

He took over the group and again, like Zarqawi, had a remarkable career that involved being reported as captured in 2007 and then killed in 2007 then arrested in 2009 and then throughout that period of his arrest or the period that we are supposed to be led to believe that he was under arrest, he was releasing recordings, obviously not from prison but from wherever he really was, that were being identified and authenticated by the highly, highly suspect Site Institute which probably beggars a podcast all on its own, but they authenticated these recordings that were being released all of this time that he was reported as being arrested.

And then in 2010 he was reported as being killed once again.

So again we have multiple reportings of captures and killings and arrests that don’t seem to make any logical sense, but just as in the case of Zarqawi, in the case of Baghdadi it becomes that much more strange when we find out that the fictional ISI leader – Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was identified as such by the US Pentagon.

Yes, once again the US military actually reported on how they believed Abu Omar al-Bagdadi didn’t even exist. This comes from a Reuters article, of one of many sources, but we can source it to a Reuters article ‘”Senior Qaeda figure in Iraq a myth” says US military’, where they talk about a a senior operative for al-Qaeda in Iraq who was in custody of the US military, and was being interrogated and according to the testimony of this captured al-Qaeda in Iraq fighter:

“The Islamic State of Iraq is a front organization that masks the foreign influence and leadership within al-Qaeda in Iraq in an attempt to put an Iraqi face on the leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Bergner said.

U.S. military officials in recent weeks have been pressed to explain the link between al-Qaeda in Iraq and bin Laden’s global network given the military’s heightened focus on al-Qaeda in Iraq as the biggest threat to the country.

The military blames al-Qaeda in Iraq for most of the major bombings in Iraq, saying the group is trying to spark all-out civil war between majority Shi’tes and minority Sunni Arabs.”

(Source: Senior Qaeda figure in Iraq a myth: U.S. military | Time Reference: 20:17)

Again a very interesting, very bizarre report that again includes briefing slides from the Pentagon that show that the Pentagon itself calls Abu Omar al-Baghdadi the fictional ISI leader, so once again the US military didn’t even believe this person existed, and this was from a 2007 report, so once again throwing more sand into the water, more mud in the mix to make it even murkier, the US military bumbles in, and it’s again a question of what their ultimate aim in all of this is but I think it is answered in that third paragraph where we learn about how the US military is blaming al-Qaeda in Iraq for the instability in the country at that time, which included of course the bombing of the Golden Mosque, which is a false flag operation worthy of an entire subject or podcast in and of itself, clearly related to the P2OG operations to stir up Islamic radicalism and terrorism by creating terrorist events, and that’s ultimately what was happening. That was what was behind this and that’s what we can attribute these strange dealings with al-Qaeda in Iraq to . The fact that the US military was pumping them up as a PSYOP operation and then apparently revealing that PSYOP operation and saying “Look, this guy’s just a fake, he’s a myth!”.

Very, very strange dealings going on, and again remember this is the precursor group to the group that is now referred to as is IS or ISIS, so a very strange pedigree for this terrorist group with the fingerprints of the US Pentagon and military all over it, as we shall see when we get into the next character in this list of this cavalcade of terrorist-boogeyman, and the next one is also Baghdadi.

This one not Abu Omar al-Baghdadi but Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi also known as Ibrahim bin ‘Awad bin Ibrahim al-Badri ar-Radawi al-Husseini as-Samara’i, who is now also known as Caliph Ibrahim, the caliph of the Islamic State Caliphate.

So what is known about this character and where he came from? Almost nothing, in fact almost everything that we know about the background of this character sources from an completely unverifiable online biography.

So take from that what you will but apparently he was born in Samarra in Iraq in 1971; at some point he apparently attended the Atlantic University of Baghdad and it was reported that he was a leader of a mosque, I believe, in Samarra, he was a cleric in a mosque in Samarra during ‘The American Invasion’ in 2003 according to quote unquote ‘reports’ – unidentified reports – that’s what the BBC sourced that to – and then he was detained at Camp Bucca which was a US Forces Iraq camp at some point between 2004 and 2009 and again this story conflicts. According to the official story he was detained from February to December of 2004, that’s what the Defense Department will admit to, before being released on the recommendation of the Combined Review and Release Board. Why they recommended him for release I’m not sure, but at any rate that’s the official story.

However we have Army Colonel Kenneth King who was the former commander of Camp Bucca who insists that this character – this man who is now known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – was at the camp during his tenure at Camp Bucca all the way up until 2009 when the camp with turned over to the Iraqi justice system, and he insists this because he remembers this particular character saying “We’ll see you in New York” or something of that nature, a ‘terrorist threat’, so even after the point at which the discrepancy between the Defense Department’s story that Bagdadi was released in 2004 , and King’s story that he was there in 2009, even when that discrepancy became apparent and was pointed out to King he specifically said again he was sure of it. He insists that he was there.

So, again, the official story is that he was only there for the better part of a year but at any rate he may have been there up until 2009 and then presumably released by the Iraqi authorities at some point. Again it’s a completely murky story, but at some point he was under the care and detainment of the US military.

Then, having gotten out of the camp he was announced as leader of the Islamic State of Iraq as it was known at that time, the AQI having morphed into the ISI in 2010 and then, once again had something of a interesting career having being reported as captured in 2012 and then in 2014 he was rumored as dead but just a few days later a video of him was released, a video of him delivering some sort of sermon or lecture or what-have-you, which is interesting because there are only apparently two photographs in existence of this person.

So again almost nothing whatsoever is known of Baghdadi, almost nothing whatsoever of his background, almost nothing whatsoever about the details of his detainment – how he came out of detainment – what he’s been doing in the intervening years, but here he is the Caliph of the Caliphate

So an exceptionally shady character and on that blank slate a lot has been written, some of which is clearly fictional which we will get to towards the end of this presentation but let’s just keep that in mind and I would just ask you to you take with a giant grain of salt any information you hear about this man and his background and really look into where and what the source of that information is.

So that’s some of the main characters behind this group and as we turn our attention to what this group consists of in terms of its equipment, its ability, what can it actually do, we are told that the arsenal of jihad contained and wielded by this shadowy deadly terrorist-boogeyman group consists of: 30 T 55 tanks; 10 T72 tanks; Blackhawks; cargo planes; Humvees; Toyota trucks; AK47s; M79s; RBG-6s; RPG-7s; Howitzers; field guns; AACs; Stinger manpads; scud missiles and a low-grade nuclear material of unknown origin and… a partridge in a pear tree.

Yes, again this is just a ridiculous list of equipment but at any rate most of it has been sourced to various things that they’ve managed to accrue from their various military conquests including for example their takeover of Mosul back earlier this year in which they secured the Black Hawk helicopters and the cargo planes from the airport and also the nuclear material, the low-grade nuclear material that they acquired from Mosul University which according to the International Atomic Energy Agency is a low risk for nuclear proliferation because it is such low grade – such low quality.

So these are the things that we are told that they’ve gathered from their various exploits. Some of the interesting items in there I think are for example the Toyota trucks, which have become something of a hallmark of jihadis in various contacts. In fact I’m pretty sure there used to be a channel, maybe there still is, on YouTube called ‘Jihadis Love Toyota’, which is very true you’ll notice in a lot of a jihadi footage they are riding around in Toyotas.

There are reasons for that, Toyotas of course being quite ubiquitous in that region of the world since Japanese aid to the Middle East generally comes in the form of equipment and various products and so Toyotas are among the types of things that find their way to the Middle East, and because of their ubiquity the parts and servicing for them are widely available so they’re quite useful for any group that wants to have sort of mobile access to the area, including the jihadis, and the Toyotas in possession of ISIS in particular seem to have come courtesy of, surprise surprise, Uncle Sam.

According to a report on truthandaction.org, which I’ll link because I think it is very interesting and includes some audio footage about the Toyotas in the Middle East, but it also says that the ‘wish list’ of the so-called moderate Syrians that was handed to the US military back last year when the US was handing out supplies included Toyota Hiluxes, the Toyota trucks that are now in the possession of ISIS, so, surprise surprise you give to the moderates and who ends up getting them? Well the non-moderates.

As if there were really any moderates there in the terrorist group trying to take over Syria in the first place.

But that’s what they have in their possession in terms of equipment. Where they actually get the money to do what they do… well according to what we’re being told they looted the Iraqi army. They acquired as much is 429 million dollars from the Mosul central bank which they took over earlier this year. They are extracting ransom money and extortion money from various governments throughout this time period, and they are selling oil from their northern Syria territories to the tune of as much as 2 million dollars a day, supposedly.

So these are the places where they’re supposedly financing what’s going on, however we can contrast that with some other information that we’ve acquired from different sources. For example it’s been widely and repeatedly reported throughout this entire conflict that private Gulf donors via Kuwait, and apparently the Kuwaiti financial system is specifically well set up for this type of financing, but at any rate private gold donors have accounted for a lot of the money that has flowed into Syria to fund the various terrorist groups including ISIS and the others that are there, and again that’s private donors not necessarily the House of Saud or anything of that sort but private donors from the Gulf, who obviously have religious reasons for trying to support the Sunni Wahabi Jihadist Muslims.

Arms and supplies from Libya via Turkey and Jordan. This comes from a number of sources including James and Joanne Moriarty who I of course interviewed earlier this year on the Corbett Report, talking about their startling testimony about what they saw when they were in Libya during the collapse, and of course the story there is that Benghazi was all about the gun-running that was going on there. The ambassador was looking to blow the whistle. They took him out of the equation before he could do so, and that’s why the CIA were swarming all in and around Benghazi at that time, that’s why they were there, that’s why they are still continuing to be intimately involved in the cover-up of what happened in Benghazi.

I went through all of the details of this in, I think, a very important interview that I did earlier this year so I’ll put the link to that in the show notes as well, and suffice it to say Benghazi was the lexus where all of those Libyan arms were flowing from the Libyan terrorists to the Syrian terrorists, via Turkey and Jordan, and I think that’s an important part to keep in mind because those, again, are two very important players in this story.

Then of course we also have the direct delivery of light munitians via the CIA which started again last year and which, again can be traced directly to what’s going on in the country.

So we have a lot of different sources for what’s happening in there and they all converge on this ISIS group – this ISL group – that suddenly seemed to spring out of nowhere but of course has been gestating there for 15 years and has been, as we’ve seen, involved with the US Pentagon, involved in various PSYOPS operations to make this group seem more important than it is, interestingly enough.

So that brings us to some of the questions of “Well where are these funds coming from and how are these troops being trained?” and as always, all roads lead to…Washington?

AMY GOODMAN: “The Wall Street Journal recently revealed new details about how Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, Saudi’s former ambassador to the United States, is leading the effort to prop up the Syrian rebels. The Wall Street Journal reports Prince Bandar has been jetting from covert command centers near the Syrian front lines to the Élysée Palace in Paris and the Kremlin in Moscow seeking to undermine the outside machine. The journal also reports intelligence agents from Saudi Arabia, the US, Jordan and other allied States are working at a secret joint operation center in Jordan to train and arm handpicked Syrian rebels.

ADAM ENTOUS: Last summer they be created this operation center, and what what is happening now is you have actually more CIA officers now there at that base than there are Saudi personnel. They fly weapons in. The Saudis are the ones who are doing the bulk of this. They buy the weapons largely in places like Eastern Europe, and to a certain extent Libya, and they bring into this base, which has a landing strip and store houses for the weapons to be stored. They, the Saudis and the Jordanians draw on the defectors, largely from the Syrian military which already have a good degree of military training, and they’re brought to this base where different intel-agencies train them, and the Americans are there,the Brits are there, the French are there, the Saudis, UAE is there. And then they train them and then they send them into the fight but very, very slowly this process has been built up over the last couple of months.”

(Source: Iran-Contra Redux? Prince Bandar Heads Secret Saudi-CIA Effort to Aid Syrian Rebels, Topple Assad | Time Reference: 34:11)

So the CIA in conjunction with their friends in Britain and France and Saudi Arabia and the UAE and elsewhere are converging or have converged or did converge in Jordan to train various Syrian militants – terrorists – at a base in Jordan.

Hmmm, this sounds very familiar and it probably should to long time listeners of the Corbett report because despite the fact that this is only being reported in the last several months it was in fact reported by Boiling Frogs Post and Corbett Report and other outlets, long before. In fact Boiling Frogs Post broke this story back in late November of 2011. That was followed up by an interview that I conducted with Nizar Nayouf, I believe back in December of 2011. At that time that story received a lot of ridicule from people online who said “Why should we trust you? Why would we believe that there’s this secret US base being used to train terrorists on the Syria/Jordan border?”

But as it turns out that’s exactly what happened. That was confirmed finally by the mainstream dinosaur media at the beginning of 2013, so a year and a half later it was finally confirmed, and then we started to get reports like that one that’s referenced in Democracy Now, and then finally earlier this year it turned out “Oh, lo and behold, some of the ISIS fighters are some of those people who were being trained at this base!”

So, again it shouldn’t really be any surprise really for any long time listeners of The Corbett Report but there it is, documented. And I’ll put again the links in the show notes to all of those various stories so you can put those pieces of that puzzle together and find out ‘Well yes actually, the US has been intimately involved; the CIA has been intimately involved in training a lot of the people who went on to become the top ISIS fighters’.

So if this sounds surprising well you haven’t been paying attention, not only to the Syrian story but really to any of these stories going back decades and decades, with the most famous of course being the US involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s back when they were helping the Freedom Fighters – the Taliban before they started going after the evil terrorists – the Taliban.

Unfortunately a script we know all too well and when it comes to how these groups are armed and trained it just continues.

LT. GENERAL MCINERNEY: “Syria we backed, I believe in some cases, some of the wrong people, and not in the right part of the Free Syrian Army and that’s a little confusing to people, so I’ve always maintained and go back quite some time that we were backing the wrong types.

I think it’s gonna turn out maybe this weekend, in a new special that Brett Baer’s gonna have Friday, it’s gonna show some of those weapons from Benghazi ended up in the hands of ISIS.

So we helped build ISIS. Now there’s a danger there and I’m with you.”

(Source: Lt. General McInerney says Obama helped build ISIS | Time Reference: 38:19)

Oh you’re with us? Well good, I’m glad you’ll at least admit that. That was General McInerney , the link will be in the show notes so you can see that ‘Yes as it turns out, how can you ever know these things, funding the moderates apparently some of this went to ISIS, imagine that!. So we kind of build up ISIS oh and let’s go to the next news story.”

So again this is not controversial. This is not something that we have to speculate about. This is something that has been documented in a lot of mainstream contexts as well, so really this brings us to the heart of the question ‘Who is behind ISIS?’ and there are at least six groups. We can probably dig deeper and bring in some other groups but six of the main groups that we can identify as being the real powers that have brought ISIS to the position that it’s in right now, and in alphabetical order that would be Israel NATO, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the US, although to a certain extent these are groups rather than nation-states per se, specifically in the case of Saudi Arabia where of course the House of Saud has institutional and fundamental reasons why it would not be happy about a radical caliphate on its doorstep, because obviously that would threaten the institution of the House of Saud itself, but certainly individual Saudis, private donors as we’ve said, and including some members of the Royal House of Saud would be interested in helping fund a radical Wahabi jihadi Salafi group, which is of course based on a Saudi Arabian branch or strain of Islam, so there has been and continues to be a lot of arms and money that has come from Saudi Arabia for this conflict.

Let’s get into some of the other groups, for example Turkey obviously has its fingerprints all over everything that’s happening in Syria and has been since the inception. Turkey has a lot of different reasons for being involved that range from its constant requests to keep its neighbors fighting with each other and destabilized, using Islam as a weapon, Turkey is happy to do so. I think the Turkish leadership has no allegiance really to Islam except for the fact that it’s a useful political tool for the largely Islamic Turkish population, and also it can be used in fights like this to keep its neighbors destabilized and to keep Turkey an important foothold for Europe and NATO in the region, and I think that’s one of the reasons.

I think they’re also obviously always looking to repress and find ways to stamp out their Kurdish population problem so I think this is one extension of that, and we’ve seen for example the false-flag recordings that were released with the high-ranking Turkish officials under Erdogan talking openly about how they wanted to stage an attack on Turkish targets in Syria in order to justify Turkish incursion into Syria, which of course brings with it the specter of NATO because of the mutual self-defense clause in the NATO article – the treaty – so Turkey a very, very menacing prospect/player in all of this and someone who is again been admittedly and documentably linked to the transfer of funds and arms to the terrorist groups in Syria.

Qatar has a number of reasons ranging again from religious to geopolitical, and we’ll get more into the sort of pipeline politics that Qatar sees in all of this.

When it comes to NATO specifically let’s talk, of course in this context once again, about Gladio B, ie. the ongoing continuation of Operation Gladio which was not a mere stay behind operation in Europe to counter some perceived or imagined Soviet occupation of Europe, but in fact a global operation that involves ‘Strategy of Tension’ and false-flag terrorism as ways of achieving various NATO operation goals in various ‘theaters’, and we’ve talked of course about Sibel Edmonds and her revelation of Gladio B, ie. the fermenting of Islamic terrorism in various parts of the world to further these aims and goals and taking over various squares on the geopolitical chess board, and of course Sibel and I went through that in great detail in our Gladio B Series which I will once again refer you to, where we talked mostly about Central Asia and the Northern Caucasus as being very geostrategic regions, where a lot of this is taking place right now on the doorstep of Russia and China, but of course we have to think about Gladio B as a worldwide operation and I would see no reason why it wouldn’t also be operative in the Middle East, and we have to look for NATO fingerprints in what’s happening there, and we can see them through the actions, for example most specifically of the US, in helping to arm, fund and run PSYOP operations surrounding this ISI group – this ISIS group – lslamic state.

Now let’s get into more detail on some of these characters, for example of course Israel, who I think is interested in pretty much anything that happens in the Middle East, should be fairly apparent, but this is something that we documented specifically back in Episode 279 of this program, where we asked ‘Who is really behind the Syrian war?’, and if you haven’t seen that episode or if you haven’t seen it in a while I suggest you relisten or rewatch it, because pretty much everything that’s talked about in that episode is still relevant to what’s going on in Syria today, as the US spearheads the airstrikes and begins the preparations for the long-term, whatever is going to emerge, whether it’s an occupation or whatever type of military incursion eventuates from this. All of this of course continues to swirl around the same topics that we discussed back in that Episode 279 of this podcast. And in that Episode 279, in relation to General Clark’s seven countries in five years or whatever that plan was that General Clark revealed, we talked specifically about a plan that General Clark did not talk about, that is the Greater Zionist Plan for a Middle East, and we documented some of that plan and how that plays into what’s happening in Syria today.

Israel’s designs on Iraq have been well-known and well-understood for a long time but I think we have to see all of these invasions and overthrows and all of the destabilizations in the Middle East in recent years as part of a grander Zionist project for reshaping the Middle East, that we can say not only predates that five-year plan that General Wesley Clark talks about but predates it by decades at the very least, documentably and on the record.

So let’s take a look at part of that record, and we’re going to take a look at an important document that you can find out more about in an article that was posted on globalresearch.ca in March of this year called Greater Israel: Zionist plan for the Middle East, and this talks about the Oded Yinon plan which was something that was developed in a document that was published in 1982 in the journal called Directions which was published by the Department of information for the World Zionist Organization, and this document was translated into English by the Association of Arab-American University Graduates so I will put the English translation in the links for the show notes for today’s episode, so you can go and read this document for yourself directly. I think it’s a very eye-opening document going back actually three decades now, to Israel’s bigger foreign policy and its plans for basically breaking and carving up the Middle East in order to institute this ‘Greater Israel’ idea, and it lays this out in some detail. But let’s take a look at just the operative part of this document, talking about what the Israeli plan for Syria was in this World Zionist Organization document, and it says:

“The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.”

(Source: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East | Time Reference: 46:29)

So Israel not only obviously has an interest and a stake in what’s going on in its neighboring countries but demonstrably, on-the-record, explicitly does have a plan for the ‘Greater Israel’ that they want to establish in the Middle East and that will only come through the destabilization of its various neighbors and through ethnic and racial and religious infighting and that specifically again, has been laid out, not only of course with Iraq but also with Syria, and we see that playing out today so I think that at any rate we’ve seen the plan and we’ve seen what’s playing out and we see a great accord between the two so we would be fools not to investigate the connection between those two pieces of the puzzle. And another piece of this puzzle that can not or should not be overlooked is something that we also mentioned in that Episode 279 but we’ll look at this from a different piece of media that I created.

Back in September of last year we talked to Pepe Escobar about Pipeline Politics in the Middle East and how they play into what’s going on in Syria, specifically with regard to a pipeline known as the ISI pipeline, Iran, Iraq, Syria pipeline or the Islamic pipeline, which threatened to connect the Iranian South Pars gas field to Turkey ultimately, through Iran, through Iraq and then through Syria – the northern part of Syria – into Turkey that could then be fed into Europe, which would be a great way to replace Russian gas wouldn’t it? Except for the fact that, oh yeah, it comes from Iran so of course Europe would never be able to consider that, would they?

The fact that there there was a Memorandum of Understanding signed between Iran, Iraq and Syria shortly before all of this kerfuffle in Syria began is again, highly telling of what this situation is at least partially about, and I think to a large extent this is a very important piece of this puzzle, and it shows why Assad suddenly became in the crosshairs despite the fact of having been a willing accomplice in the CIA’s rendition and torture program for example, and sort of one of the ‘good boys’ that we tolerated for a long time, how he suddenly became enemy number one is the question, and the Islamic pipeline is one answer. So let’s listen to at least a section of that interview that we conducted with Pepe Escobar back in September of last year.

JAMES CORBETT: As we’ve talked about on this program before, a lot of this comes down to the Pipeline Politics that is increasingly hard-wiring geopolitical relations onto the grand chessboard and this is no exception with a Memorandum of Understanding having recently been signed between Iran, Iraq and Syria for a new gas pipeline that really could potentially change the game if it was allowed to proceed. Let’s tell people about this pipeline and this Memorandum of Understanding that was just signed.

PEPE ESCOBAR: Okay this is absolutely essential – it’s the Iran, Iraq, Syria pipeline, which even in some parts of the Middle East they call it, with a little bit of sense of humor in fact, the ‘Islamic Pipeline’. What is that, right? But, this is absolutely essential for two reasons. It bypasses two of the nations that are absolutely keen on regime change in Syria: Turkey and Qatar…

…This would be the perfect situation for the European Union. They say they have an energy policy. They don’t. For their energy policy to be coordinated with Iran, Iran, Iraq and Syria and get the gas from this pipeline, considering they were never going to get gas from Turkmenistan or from Azerbaijan.

(Source: Pipeline Politics and the Syrian War | Time Reference: 48:56)

So there again is a direct reason – a direct interest – for some of the members of that ‘Who is behind ISIS?’ coalition for not getting behind Assad and in fact getting in his way, to try to stop the creation of this pipeline, and of course as Escobar mentions in that interview, one of the proposed routings for that ISI pipeline would be to take the gas directly from Homs there in Syria and ship it out through the port, that’s completely getting around Turkey altogether, which would not be in Turkish interests and would not be in Qatari interests. Qatar of course having a gas of its own that it wants to export to Europe and wants to make part of the new European gas energy policy.

So again there are some direct motivations for why Iran, Iraq and Syria are in the target sights of these various powers that are converging on fighting the Islamic State threat.

Now let’s debunk some of the fear and propaganda that’s swirling around about this, starting with the easy targets in the mainstream media who, you may have seen, have been pimping this map of the Middle East that is supposedly part of some grand five-year war plan of the Islamic State, or something of that sort, and for those of you who are listening to the mp3 audio of this podcast rather than watching the video presentation, this map basically covers from North Africa, all the way from the western edge of North Africa, all the way through basically the top half of the African continent to the eastern part of Africa, across the Gulf into the Gulf states, into the Central Asia region, all the way up to the doorstep of China and Russia. It’s as far north as the Northern Caucasus as it goes up through Turkey into Eastern Europe, and even Spain is part of this map. It’s marked as black as in being the aspirational hope of the growth of the Islamic State over the next five years and it’s labeled, helpfully, with all of these various regional names that are apparently going to be given to the various parts of the chessboard once the IS takes them over.

There’s Oropba and Kordistan and Oozaz and Andalus and Maghreb and all of this. Now this looks like a very scary map – ‘Oh my god this is what Islamic State has planned, it’s their five-year plan, are you afraid? You’d better be very afraid’.

Except for the fact that of course it is all bunkum and hokum. And this has been displayed prominently all over NBC News and ABC News and of course the Daily Mail. The ‘Daily Fail’ has picked it up as well and has asked people to cower in their boots about it. “ISIS Map Reveals Chilling 5-Year Plan for Global Domination” screams the Daily Mail Online’s Twitter account.

But the interesting part about this map is that even as ABC and NBC and others admit it sources back to a Twitter account for the ‘Third Position’, which people might recognize as a new Nazi fascist organization and ultimately the map sources back, if you go all the way back, it sources to basically fans of the ISIS group who put this together as their, I guess, wet dream project, just basically saying “This will belong to us” and it makes absolutely no sense geopolitically in any sense. If you look at the map it includes all sorts of areas of the map where even the Islamic areas of that map, they are completely different sorts of Islam that would not be compatible with, in any way, with the Islamic State and would have no interest or affinity to the people who supposedly comprise the Islamic State, etcetera, etcetera.

It’s complete bunkum. It would literally be if I came out and painted half of the global map red and called it Corbetistan – “It’s my 5-year plan for global domination”, and if NBC and ABC and everyone else picked it up, it would have as much reality of this map does. So if you’ve seen this map please try to un-see it because it means nothing, literally.

Although it is interesting that the eastern section of this map in the Central Asia and South Asian region is labeled as ‘Khurasan’ which we will come to in a moment but, at any rate this map is totally 100% made up and bogus and just meant to keep you afraid.

The other debunking that we have to do is one that spread through the alternative media like wildfire earlier this summer, despite the fact that there was absolutely completely nothing to it. It was completely made up out of old cloth. It is the idea that there was some secret Snowden document that revealed that Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi, the current leader of the Islamic State – Ibrahim Khalif – is in fact a Mossad agent, and this was apparently proven by these documents.

Now this was picked up by some major alternative media outlets and because of that was then posted to tens of thousands of other outlets and it just mushroomed from there. Every single one of them basically just sourcing some reports, generally from the Gulf Arab Press or something of that sort, and not really looking into it. Of course they would always mention the fact that this sources from Snowden documents ‘New Snowden documents reveal…’ of course it would never ever link to those documents because they don’t exist.

There has been a lot of work put into trying to source where did this rumor actually start and the earliest that can be found is a post on an Arabic website with a German domain name that posted an article that translates to ‘Snowden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: the result of a three-nation intelligence operation cooperation’, and again there’s absolutely nothing to this. The existence of those documents have been denied by everyone who has access to them from Greenwald to WikiLeaks and everyone else. The documents that never been shown or in any way revealed as to how this strange Arabic German website supposedly got its hands on it, but again this sources to absolutely nothing. It’s from the ether. It’s completely made up, and the most disappointing part is that the alternative media picked it up and started using it as absolute concrete 100 percent established fact, despite the fact that there was literally nothing sourcing it, there was nothing behind it, and that is why, as always, it’s exceptionally important to have your facts straight and to have your sources straight and to know where this information is supposedly coming from.

Hey I’m not saying, given the exceptionally big question mark that is Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi and this person, this character ‘s background? We know almost nothing about him so it certainly could be the case that it is an intelligence operation, that he is an intelligence plant, that he was radicalized in Camp Bucca or by the Pentagon as part of some PSYOP operation. All of those things are absolutely valid speculation and I assume that it is actually something of that sort, but there is absolutely zero evidence for this supposed Mossad connection and so we should not parrot it as iron-clad fact, because we, in the alternative media, are the upholders of truth in this age of constant and universal lies, so with that comes the responsibility of being responsible about our sources and where they come from.

But it almost makes you wonder, once you have all these facts, everything that we’ve gone through in this presentation and the much more that there is to go through on the fake beheading videos and everything that we haven’t even touched on in this that you can find out more about in that ‘Who is ISIS?’ article and the comments that accompany it, even once we get all of that under our belts and have it all sourced and documented and all of the ‘i’s dotted and ‘t’s crossed, you have to wonder if it matters at all in the end because at the end of the day, just like in Iraq they can say “It’s weapons of mass destruction”, “mushroom cloud”, “ah they’re coming to get us”, and then after the invasion “oh no it wasn’t about that it was about democracy in Iraq” or something like that. Well just as exactly as they can do that they can also say “Islamic State’s coming to get you” or “ISIS ah fear, fear, fear” and then they can say “Oh did we say ISIS? We meant someone completely different.”.

WOLF BLITZER: “There was an imminent threat, imminent, threat, from this splinter group – this offshoot of al-Qaeda if you will -the Khorasan Group.

NEWS REPORTER: …plotting imminent attacks on the west…

NEWS REPORTER: …threat from the Khorasan Group…

NEWS REPORTER: …al-Qaeda veterans known as The Khorasan Group…

NEWS REPORTER: … to attack the US and Western interests

ANISSA NAOUAI: A week ago no one ever heard of this terror group but now we do and and this is what we know. It’s a group believed to have broken apart from al-Qaeda. Some say it’s even worse. There are only 50 members and their specialty is bomb-making according to ‘US intelligence’. Khorasan’s leader is also known and again was apparently coordinating attacks on the US and its allies.”

(Source: How Khorasan came out of the blue | Time Reference: 1:00:20)

That’s right, I mean does it even matter because even if you do expose this IS group as a propaganda creation of the Pentagon and you go through and you take a look at all of these pieces of the puzzle, at the end of the day they can just insert a completely different puzzle and say “Hey look solve this one”, and that’s unfortunately the way this game goes. So now a completely new group that no one had ever heard of a week ago is now apparently the center focus of the terror porn that we’re going to be inundated with, indefinitely. Basically until people stop listening to or believing in, anything whatsoever that is being pimped out via the mouthpiece-media, of course coming through the government organs that are pumping that information in through the back door.

So until we put our foot down and stop listening to the fear-porn and propaganda, they will keep feeding it to us, and it’s in that regard that it is very hopeful and a good thing that, as I’ve pointed out a few times now, trust in media among the US population has again fallen to record lows. That is trust in the television and newspapers and supposed purveyors of dinosaur journalism has fallen to a record low of 40 percent, which again is not low enough but at any rate it does show that things are headed in the right direction and people are tuning out in droves. In fact CNBC has just hit its worst viewership numbers in years and I think the other dinosaur media outlets are also similarly bleeding their viewership, listenership and readership as they should be, for having pimped this fear-porn out for so very, very long.

But it is now up to us in the alternative media to take up the mantle of actually reporting on what is really going on and that’s why these open-source investigations are so important.

If you learnt something new in this presentation, something you think is valuable for others to know, please do spread this information. It’s the only way we can grow and foster and get more people aware of this. There’s no advertising budget here, this media is brought to you by you so if you do value it please pass it on to other people because, again, we have to counter the propaganda and get people out of the matrix where they’re living in fear of these boogeyman, that may or may not even actually exist.

So again, once again it’s up to all of you out there to carry on this flame, to continue the conversation on corbettreport.com and to spread this information to others. Once again if you do want to join that conversation or you want to support this work, it is brought to you by you, I do rely on your support so you can of course sign up for a membership at corbettreport.com that helps to keep this media going and growing.

That’s going to be it for this week. Once again I do thank you for tuning in for this presentation and I’m looking forward to talking to you all again very soon.

(Outro Music: Schmeek – Boogeyman Blues)