US taxpayers’ money to Al Qaeda

This video is called Al Qaeda fighters at Bab Al Hawa border post, Syria 19 07 12.

By Bill Van Auken in the USA:

US intelligence admits Syria arms aid goes to Al Qaeda

16 October 2012

American intelligence officials are acknowledging that the bulk of the weapons flowing into Syria for the US-backed war to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad are going into the hands of Al Qaeda and like-minded Islamist militias.

A lead article appearing in the New York Times Monday confirms the mounting reports from the region that jihadist elements are playing an increasingly prominent role in what has become a sectarian civil war in Syria.

“Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats,” the Times reports.

The article reflects the growing disquiet within US ruling circles over the Obama administration’s strategy in Syria and, more broadly, in the Middle East, and adds fuel to the deepening foreign policy crisis confronting the Democratic president with just three weeks to go until the election.

In the distorted public debate between Democrats and Republicans, this crisis has centered around the September 11 attack on the US consulate and a secret CIA headquarters in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi that claimed the lives of the US ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans.

Republicans have waged an increasingly aggressive public campaign, indicting the Obama administration for failure to protect the American personnel. They have also accused the White House of attempting to cover up the nature of the incident, which the administration first presented as a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Islamic video, before classifying it as a terrorist attack.

In Sunday television interviews, Republicans pressed this line of attack while Democrats countered that it was a political “witch-hunt” and that the initial description of the attack was based on available intelligence at the time.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, appearing on the NBC news program “Face the Nation,” argued that the description of the fatal attack in Benghazi as a spontaneous event was politically motivated. The Obama reelection campaign, he charged, is “trying to sell a narrative that… Al Qaeda has been dismantled—and to admit that our embassy was attacked by Al Qaeda operatives undercuts that narrative.”

What is involved, however, is not merely the disruption of an election campaign “narrative.” The events in Benghazi blew apart the entire US policy both in Libya and Syria, opening up a tremendous crisis for American foreign policy in the region.

The forces that attacked the US consulate and CIA outpost in Benghazi were not merely affiliates of Al Qaeda, they were the same forces that Washington and its allies had armed, trained and supported with an intense air war in the campaign for regime-change that ended with the brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi one year ago.

Ambassador Stevens, who was sent into Benghazi at the outset of this seven-month war, was the point man in forging this cynical alliance between US imperialism and forces and individuals that Washington had previously branded as “terrorists” and subjected to torture, rendition and imprisonment at Guantanamo.

The relationship between Washington and these forces echoed a similar alliance forged in the 1980s with the mujahideen and Al Qaeda itself in the war fostered by the CIA in Afghanistan to overthrow a government aligned with Moscow and to bloody the Soviet army.

Just as in Afghanistan, the Libyan arrangement has led to “blowback” for US imperialism. Having utilized the Islamist militias to follow up NATO air strikes and hunt down Gaddafi, once this goal was achieved Washington sought to push them aside and install trusted assets of the CIA and the big oil companies as the country’s rulers. Resenting being cut out of the spoils of war, and still heavily armed, the Islamist forces struck back, organizing the assassination of Stevens.

The Obama administration cannot publicly explain this turn of events without exposing the so-called “war on terror,” the ideological centerpiece of American foreign policy for over a decade, as a fraud, along with the supposedly “humanitarian” and “democratic” motives for the US intervention in Libya.