Prior to the invasion of Iraq over Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), CIA Director George Tenet, following White House instruction, did not request an intelligence estimate of Iraq’s WMD situation before approaching the Senate, knowing the report would clearly show that 90% were thought to have been destroyed after the Gulf War and the information on more weapons or their ongoing production was improvable. However, because the Senate requested a report before a vote, the CIA, increasingly politicized over time rather than a ‘fact-only’ intelligence community, agreed to falsify a report under the direction of senior official Robert Walpole. As a result, the energy crisis big oil megalomaniacs with special interests faced was circumvented, and for them, the United States’ involvement in Iraq has been marked happily ever after ever since.
Now who would benefit from creating misinformation about Syria’s chemical weapons usage? Well, let’s look at what we already know. Syria admitted their chemical weapons program in 2012, claiming they would use them on foreign opposition during the Syrian civil war but not on their own citizens. When a deadly chemical attack happened in March 2013 in the province of Aleppo, the Syrian and Russian governments both blamed the Free Syrian Army, while the rebels and Senior U.S. officials claimed the Free Syrians could not have used chemical weapons. However, the so-called ‘al-Qaeda-linked’ rebels are believed to have tried to obtain them.
In other words, the U.S. had justification to invade Syria based on a ‘red line’ of chemical weapons use being crossed as early as March 2013 and yet now not only openly funds radicals who’ve sought these weapons but now plans for direct military action. What’s so different now than in March? Maybe it has to do with the fact that Assad’s army is proving to be more effective than expected.
More directly, maybe it has to do with Syria’s alliance with the oil empire of Iran. After all, Iran is a well-documented military target for not giving Western oil companies the access they’d like. Isolating Iran from its trade partners is a clear objective, and toppling Syria’s government is just one of many recent examples of how to carry out just that.
So who’s the George Tenet of today and quite possibly tomorrow? Who broke the news on what’s now being called a ‘red line’?
The answer is Ben Rhodes, a Masters degree-accredited fiction writer and current national security adviser for ‘strategic communication’, who has no known credentials in national security, government or military service. He is best-known for running the Benghazi cover-up; you know, where a senseless video caused a nighttime protest that got out of hand. Nothing of course related to Ambassador Stevens trying to get weapons out of the hands of radicals armed by the fall of Libya’s regime (another piece Rhodes contributed to). Rhodes can be sure his latest work will continue to be in full-circulation by corporate media, seeing as how his brother is president of CBS news.