John Kirby, US State Department blatantly supports terrorists

Here are the excerpts from an article authored by Henry Kamens, a columnist and expert on Central Asia and Caucasus.

The US government, together with the MSM, blatantly supports terrorists. The nexus between politicians, terrorism and the media is well known to the intelligence community. However these links and cozy connections are usually written off as mere coincidence.

We are told that the arms and funding which they illegally receive are but an accidental by-product of supporting “freedom fighters,” and that no one planned for these groups to be transformed into terrorist organisations.

This is but the tip of the iceberg as nowadays Radicals are now just considered as rebels by the main stream media or described as “spoilers” by the US State Department, whose main spokesman, John Kirby just recently referred to Al-Nusra in East Aleppo as a spoiler to the ceasefire in Syria.

The way the US regime and the MSM support terrorists is nothing that should come as any surprise. And this is not accidental, because a specific spokesperson has been appointed to run this media spin operation.

Retired Rear Admiral Kirby is the official US State Department Spokesperson. He is a graduate of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, rather than the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, and holds degrees in history, international relations, national security and strategic studies. He has worked in information-based roles throughout his armed forces career, though usually speaking to the government rather than the public, and the steady, year-on-year increases in US military spending show he has been very effective in this role.

Kirby used to be a Pentagon spokesman, well positioned to present sensitive information in non-controversial packages for mass public consumption. The Pentagon is hardly likely to tell us the truth about the things the public should be interested in: rows between generals, unauthorized or illegal actions or what the generals really think about the politicians they serve. But it has a press service regardless, so has to turn all that into something benign and equally interesting, as far as security clearance will allow. This is why, under Kirby’s direction, radical groups which commit acts which meet any definition of terrorism, even if you agree with their cause, are now referred to simply as “rebels” by the mainstream media, or “spoilers” by the State Department.

Kirby has a neat trick for minimizing terrorism: he refers to Daesh by the silly name Dash, a word Americans are familiar with from athletics, which conjures up images of educated young people in running gear rather than hooded terrorists murdering, beheading and marauding. His statements about Dash are really questionable. People probably think they are funny, what about those families of the beheaded people and those killed by Daesh, would they find it funny? It is sick. Readers should be disgusted with Kirby.

Perhaps these guys think they have the terrorists controlled and managed. However when you tell the public we are at war with radicals, and Al Nusra and others are on the terrorist watch list, why are these “national security experts” allowed to give them the pass as if allies? The key is that we have allies that are radicals who have attacked us and lots of others. Those allies are supporting the conflict in Syria.

So why is Kirby, presented as a “national security expert”, allowed to talk about them as if they are cuddly allies, or so insignificant that they are hardly worth the billions being spent fighting them?

Wars are by definition controversial, and always attract comment. Everyone has an opinion about a given conflict, and an important point, as they see it, to make. So there is always an endless stream of people who could be called upon to comment in the media. The only way to give any credibility to the contributor chosen is to present them as having some particular qualification, and Kirby’s title unquestionably gives him one.

It is clear that even some very prominent main stream journalists are actually supporting “rebels” by engaging with them in these learned exchanges. Have you ever noticed how certain articles and statements attract a large number of comments saying the same thing? These are allegedly from members of the public, and therefore by inference “neutral”, the response of the man or woman in the street rather than an interested party. However this “vox pop” system is easy to manipulate, and there is plenty of evidence this is actually happening.

A State Department Spokesman has a long reach. You have to have a lot of weapons in place to take on the Pentagon, even in a verbal battle. Are we to believe that all these journalists are working with the Islamic Front independently, without help from above?

No one wants to live under a repressive regime. Consequently it is very easy to convey the notion that a “rebel” is simply a decent person fighting against injustice, as every individual likes to think they themselves are. People tend to make this connection without looking any deeper, and it takes a lot more effort than most casual observers are willing to make to go into the details of any conflict, and build a counter-narrative to the one presented by the mainstream media.

The term “rebel” is used to cover all kinds of combatants in Syria. It includes both the “moderate opposition” and self-avowed terrorists. In order to make this fiction stand up, a lot of claims need to be made and a lot of things not reported, as they would counter the picture of a homogenous group of decent people taking a stand which is so obvious it does not need to be explained.

It is rarely reported that the moderate opposition was persuaded to reject a UN plan to kick out Al Nusra, who are as much a threat to the ambitions of the moderate opposition as the Syrian government is. The opposition to Assad is now forcibly led by the terrorists the West claims to be fighting, because the more moderate forces have been subjected to it by the same West. This is why Kirby refers to Daesh as Dash – he is implying that the moderate forces are fully in agreement with it, and this somehow makes it something other than a terrorist group, in the same way Al Qaeda has been partially rehabilitated by saying its name over and over again until it becomes as familiar as breakfast to the reading public.

Similarly the word “Christian” is bandied about for an American audience which is increasingly influenced by the religious right which mushroomed as a backlash to failed liberalism. Kirby and his assistants claim that Christians are being persecuted by Assad the Muslim, without going into exactly who is meant by “Christians”, and what the ramifications of holding that faith are.

Most Syrian Christians describe themselves as Orthodox, but they are split into two very different groups. One is under the Patriarchate of Antioch, based in Damascus, and the other is under either the Jacobite Syrian church or the Nestorian Assyrian church, which have been outside the mainstream Orthodox communion since the 5th century. The Church of Antioch uses Arabic in its services as part of a deal with the state for protection, whereas the Syrians generally use Syriac and the Nestorians Aramaic.

Minimizing the actions of these groups is therefore a domestic political imperative, not merely a foreign relations or security one, for Western regimes. This is why Channel 4 News published the report “Aleppo – Up Close with the Rebels” on October 5th.

It was an attempt to promote known war criminals and child murderers and thus cleanse their actions, and those of the regimes who support them and supply them with the means of committing them. When people started recognizing certain faces in the video, and connecting them to actions which had caused journalists to question the US regime’s support for this particular rebel group, Channel 4 removed its own report, most unusually.

It has not however changed its editorial policy, and presents other groups with similar records in the same way in spite of this. There is also a connection with John Kerry’s recent discussions with Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir. It is known that the 28 classified pages of the US government’s official 9\11 report, kept from public view, deal with the role Saudi Arabia played in those attacks. Now Kerry and al-Jubeir are trying to prevent the new Justice against Sponsors of Terrorism Act from having any effect.

If it is actually enacted, JASTA will restrict sovereign immunity and make it easier for individuals to prosecute the Saudi regime over 9\11, on the basis of the official report. It will also make it easier for other countries to pass parallel legislation which will result in the US being prosecuted for its own actions. This may explain why Obama vetoed the bill, and it was only passed over his veto.

Now Kerry is trying to fix it so that the bill never comes into effect.  Most terrorist groups would be equally radical in behaviour but not be able to achieve as much if just let to their own devices, as they would have neither the weaponry nor the intelligence support.

The only reason terrorists who are happy to be martyred by the Westerners accept their support is because it somehow legitimizes them, and they can hope for future favours. John Kirby is still serving the purposes of the Pentagon by presenting terrorists as reasonable, insignificant forces. Not only is he continuing the US sponsorship of terrorism by doing this, he is justifying the billions spent on fighting this apparently insignificant threat.

Those were excerpts from an article authored by Henry Kamens, a columnist and expert on Central Asia and Caucasus.

RM/SS