How Obama & McCain Armed Terrorists in Syria

Three-term Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a member of both the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, has proposed legislation that would prohibit any U.S. assistance to terrorist organizations in Syria as well as to any organization working directly with them. Equally important, it would prohibit U.S. military sales and other forms of military cooperation with other countries that provide arms or financing to those terrorists and their collaborators.

Gabbard’s “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” challenges for the first time in Congress a U.S. policy toward the conflict in the Syrian civil war that should have set off alarm bells long ago: in 2012-13 the Obama administration helped its Sunni allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar provide arms to Syrian and non-Syrian armed groups to force President Bashar al-Assad out of power. And in 2013 the administration began to provide arms to what the CIA judged to be “relatively moderate” anti-Assad groups—meaning they incorporated various degrees of Islamic extremism.

That policy, ostensibly aimed at helping replace the Assad regime with a more democratic alternative, has actually helped build up al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise al Nusra Front into the dominant threat to Assad.

The supporters of this arms-supply policy believe it is necessary as pushback against Iranian influence in Syria. But that argument skirts the real issue raised by the policy’s history. The Obama administration’s Syria policy effectively sold out the U.S. interest that was supposed to be the touchstone of the “Global War on Terrorism”—the eradication of al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates. The United States has instead subordinated that U.S. interest in counter-terrorism to the interests of its Sunni allies. In doing so it has helped create a new terrorist threat in the heart of the Middle East.

If this is D. Gareth Porter, why the hell is the American Conservative printing anything he reads?

If this is the far-left Hanoi propagandist and anti-American, pro-Iranian huckster, then AC has been conned by a “commie/symph”.

The Porter I knew and debated on TV was the leader of the pro-Hanoi tax-exempt propaganda operation known as the Indochina Resource Center which was allied with another pro-Hanoi “research” group known as the Center for International Policy (CIP) - Guy Gran and George Hildebrand, among others.

These were the “genocide” and “Holocaust” denies of what the communists did in North Vietnam, South Vietnam and Cambodia.

Just read his testimony and that of Gran and Hildebrand before at least one House of Representatives committee (probably the House International Relations Committee in 1975 and around 1977, before Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-NY). In the midst of the great genocide in Cambodia, these red clowns were telling Congress that it wasn’t happening.

There is a list of congressional hearings that the Hanoi Lobby people gave from about 1969 - 1977 at the database site www.keywiki.org. It might be under the title “Hanoi Lobby” or you can search by name such as D. Gareth Porter, etc).

Porter, a product of the Hanoi Love Fest at Cornell’s SE Asian Studies Program run by Marxist prof. George McT. Kahin, also wrote a “denier” study entitled “The Myth of the Bloodbath in Vietnam” in 1972. It was unintentionally a rebuttal to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee’s compendium study “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam”, also 1972. Porter than gave his own testimony in what would be Part 2 of a 3 part series in the Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam dialogue by SISS.

He was decidedly trounced in THCCinVN, Part 3, by foreign affairs scholar and many times Vietnam/Cambodia visitor Dan Teodoru.

According to Porter, there was no deliberate massacre of up to 8,000 So. Vietnamese military, govt, and civilians/persons in the Hanoi-occupied city of Hue during the “Tet Offensive” of Jan/Feb/March 1968.

He said there were no “death lists”, no “death squads”, no mass graves along the Hue/Perfume River (over 5,000 bodies were found in its vicinity and several thousand more further in from its banks.

A friend of mind, Gary Jarmin, actually found a wire-bound body of one of these victims of the communists in the sand dunes in Hue.

After the fall of SE Asia to the communists, Porter later turned his attention to anti-Israel reporting on the Middle East, showing up in the Arab Lobby magazine “Washington Report on the Near East” by the old Aramco/anti-Israel groups of Curtis, Dall and Kilgore.

Porter and his gang of pro-communist propagandists were the equivalent of Lord Haw Haw, Tokyo Rose, Goebbels, Julius Streicher and Dur Sturmer all rolled up into one cesspool of lies whose goal was to ensure a communist victory in S.E. Asia.

Somebody should have checked Porter’s bio and what is at www.keywiki.org, www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org and on the internet.

If there ever was a face of treason during the Vietnam/Indochina conflict, besides Tom Hayden, Dave Dellinger, Cora Weiss, Don Luce, Fred Branfman, and Jane Fonda, it was D. Gareth Porter and friends. However, it was Porter and company who used their “academic” studies status to cover their Hanoi disinformation propaganda and operations, some of which were challenged by Congressmen as being illegal abuses of tax-exempt money.

Even conservatives can be “conned” if they don’t do their vetting properly. Forewarned is forearmed.

Fedora. You win the IPS Exposure Award of the Month. Phyllis Bennis is an IPS Fellow and has been for years. She is their led anti-Israel attack bitch.

This woman has a red record going back to at least the 70’s. There should be some information on her at www.keywiki.org and www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org, among other sites.

She is a vile person, period. I think she is also involved in the BDS programs. Used to write for either the old “Guardian” or “Line of March”/Frontline”, or both.

As I recall, she was also a big supporter of the Workers World Party fronts IAC, ANSWER, possibly the older PAM, as well as The World Can’t Wait front.

Somewhere along the line I saw her listed as a member of the Marxist mishmash of the National Lawyers Guild.

If you scroll down to Porter's current bio at the bottom of the article, it points towards his motive for writing the article by mentioning one of his most recent book projects:

Gareth Porter is an independent journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of numerous books, including Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Just World Books, 2014).

Here's a summary of this pro-Iranian book:

Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare: "In Manufactured Crisis, investigative reporter Gareth Porter shows how Israel and the George W. Bush administration successfully waged their campaign claiming that Iran was trying covertly to acquire a nuclear weapon. . ."

So what we have here is an old Soviet-era propagandist currently promoting pro-Iranian talking points by criticizing U.S. policy in Syria, one of Iran and Russia's traditional allies. Very interesting.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.