"Obama armed ISIS" says Pulitzer Prize winning journalist

Born in the USA

• The CIA, Islamist NATO member Turkey and Islamist Saudi Arabia have been, and still are, shoveling mountains of weapons into Middle Eastern rebel groups.
• Everyone is getting weapons EXCEPT the pro-American Kurds.
• We are ruled over by mad men looking to start WWIII.

(Albawaba News)  -  Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reports that the administration of President Barack Obama, in particular the CIA, has knowingly armed militant Islamists in Syria, including the Islamic State [Daeh].

"Barack Obama's repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office -- and that there are 'moderate' rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him -- has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon's Joint Staff," Hersh writes in the London Review of Books. "Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration's fixation on Assad's primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn't adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington's anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped."

Hersh writes that a highly classified 2013 Defense Intelligence Agency/Joint Chiefs of Staff report on Syria forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to "chaos" and possibly to Islamist extremists taking over Syria.

Hersh reports that Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, told him that his agency sent a "constant stream" of warnings to the "civilian leadership" about the dire consequences of ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Sy Hersh rips into Obama

The DIA's reporting "got enormous pushback" from the Obama administration, Hersh quotes Flynn as saying. "I felt that they did not want to hear the truth."

Hersh writes that the adviser told him the DIA/Joint Chiefs report took a "dim view" of the Obama administration's insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups and found that the covert US program to arm and support those "moderate" rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, which then morphed the program into an "across-the-board technical, arms and logistical program for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State."

"The assessment was bleak: there was no viable 'moderate' opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists," Hersh wrote.

In October, the Pentagon announced that it was discontinuing its program to train and equip moderate rebels in Syria, saying the program cost $500 million and only succeeded in training a "handful" of recruits.

In November, however, the CIA increased its shipments of arms to rebels in Syria, joining with US allies in challenging Russia and Iran's involvement in Syria in support of the Assad regime.

Seymour Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his reporting on the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War and has continued to write on national security for many newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker. He was widely criticized for his The Killing of Osama bin Laden report that accused President Barack Obama and his administration of lying about the circumstances surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. Many media establishments, intelligence analysts and officials, including the White House, rejected the claim.

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Sy Hersh interview: 

Pentagon Disobeyed Obama Orders to Back ISIS

An ISIS Traffic Jam
Huge convoys of ISIS oil and resupply trucks on a highway to
Turkey as photographed by Russian jets.
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See the video here and also here.