deadken posted:

that would be fucking insane

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

http://www.smh.com.au/world/rapper-identified-as-james-foleys-executioner-reports-20140824-107w1i.html posted:

British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 have identified the man suspected of the horrific beheading of American journalist James Foley, according to British media reports.

The hooded man with an English accent is believed to be 23-year-old Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, known to fellow Islamic State militants as Jihadi John.

Bary is the son of an Egyptian-born militant who is awaiting trial on terrorism charges in Manhattan, due to his alleged involvement in the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Before leaving the family home to fight in Syria, Bary was an aspiring rapper known as L Jinny whose music was played on one of Britain's most popular radio stations, BBC Radio 1.

Meanwhile, at langley

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-hostage-peter-theo-curtis-freed-in-syria/2014/08/24/aaa0d07d-37ac-407a-8753-23574383b4cf_story.html posted:

An American journalist abducted by rebels in Syria was freed Sunday after nearly two years in captivity, but his release appears to have little bearing on the fates of other hostages under threat of death from their kidnappers because of the U.S. airstrikes in Iraq.

The tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar played a key role in negotiating the release of Peter Theo Curtis, who went missing in October 2012 shortly after he crossed the Turkish border into northern Syria, U.S. officials and a statement from his family said. He was handed over to the United Nations in Syria on Sunday and is now safely out of the country, U.S. officials said...

Curtis had written about Syria and Yemen under his birth name, Theo Padnos, in publications including the New Republic, the Huffington Post and the London Review of Books.

He spoke Arabic, wrote a book about Yemen and spent the years 2007-2010 living in Syria, before the revolt against Assad. He returned again to Damascus after the 2011 uprising, writing an article for the New Republic about the underpinnings of the revolt that was critical of the government.

In the fall of 2012 he went to Turkey, the access point for journalists seeking to enter rebel-held northern Syria, and was last seen in October 2012 in the Turkish border town of Antakya, after telling colleagues that he planned to teach English in Syria.

The reference to teaching English is rapidly disappearing from almost every story about this guy lol

Lessons posted:

Crow posted:

So do you have any evidence that the US state did a total 180 due to the release of one video and is now solely attacking the same people that they armed and funded to overthrow Syria? Or are you just going to take them at their own word?

The explanation for the US launching incursions into Syria to "fight its own rebels" is simply a pretext for an operation in Syria with an eye towards elementary mission creep. What is your convoluted explanation for NATO to otherwise act schizophrenically and without any sort of strategic vision?

I'm suggesting that US support for the ISIS was never as great as you assumed, as evidenced not only by the fact they're fighting them now but also that they spent 8 years fighting them back when they were al Qaeda in Iraq. There was never a 180 but rather US (violent) opposition to ISIS has been more or less consistent since its inception, with the only gap being between the US withdrawal from Iraq in Dec 2011 to now. Incidentally I'd also suggest that US support for the rest of the rebels hasn't been as great as you assumed either considering despite the supposed mountains of cash and flood of arms the US has been giving them they've not only failed to overthrown the government but actually been pushed back on all fronts, while ISIS, without US support, more or less just rolled up and achieved more in a few months than they have in years. Decisive US support for the rebels probably could have ended the civil war long ago.

That the US is now fighting ISIS in Iraq in no way precludes previous direct and indirect support to it for the purpose of destabilization and regime change in Syria. For the US, NATO, the EU, the Gulf states, Turkey, etc., ISIS further destabilizes Syria at worst, or, at best, actually removes Assad and puts the country in a more malleable position. It's a win-win either way. In Iraq, obviously, ISIS is the perfect casus belli for the US to further embed itself.

There is no "rest of the rebels" at this point, even if there ever was. The FSA barely exists separately from ISIS, and in its limited existence operates solely along the lines of individual allegiances to a commander, a la warlordism (even more so than ISIS), rather than to any unified greater organization. The small remainder of the FSA that didn't already "defect" to ISIS with all of its Western materiel and training supports them anyway. The factions of the supposed FSA weren't unified enough to be effective, even with US support, so most rebels joined ISIS, since they're now the most unified challenge to Assad. With all of the US support coming from the "moderate" rebels that "defected," not to mention the training of ISIS-"proper" in Jordan, it only makes sense that ISIS would achieve more in a shorter amount of time since, as an amalgamation of all the ostensibly disparate rebel factions, it is the only opposition to Assad at this point.

Obviously the US wants Assad out, but they're perfectly willing to be patient about it, without even more fully, directly and indirectly, funding the opposition, ISIS, than they already are. The more Syria is destabilized, the more complete the destruction of Assad and the Syrian military will be. An Operation Syrian Freedom against Islamists with a tenuous grasp on power is more politically palatable than any other alternative.

https://bellingcat.com/resources/case-studies/2014/08/23/the-hills-of-raqqa-geolocating-the-james-foley-video/ posted:

In the video there’s not a great deal of information, however, it is possible to determine some information from the images.

It appears to be a hilly area, with barely any plants or grass, and in the distance we can see a green plain below the hills. In the below map we can see Raqqa, surrounded by green plains, with hills to the south

The position of the shadows in the video suggest this was filmed in the morning, with the camera pointing northwards. Based on that it seems reasonable to search the hills to the south of Raqqa for a possible location. But what details are available in the video to match to the featureless terrain in the area?

It appears the video was filmed on an area of raised ground, with the edge of the raised area circled in red in the below image.

Lessons posted:

"Limited Bombing Campaigns With No Boots On The Ground.......Limited Bombing Campaigns With No Boots On The Ground never changes...."

Petrol posted:

White rapper in poorly produced video shock

http://www.smh.com.au/world/rapper-identified-as-james-foleys-executioner-reports-20140824-107w1i.html posted:

British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 have identified the man suspected of the horrific beheading of American journalist James Foley, according to British media reports.

The hooded man with an English accent is believed to be 23-year-old Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, known to fellow Islamic State militants as Jihadi John.

Bary is the son of an Egyptian-born militant who is awaiting trial on terrorism charges in Manhattan, due to his alleged involvement in the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Before leaving the family home to fight in Syria, Bary was an aspiring rapper known as L Jinny whose music was played on one of Britain's most popular radio stations, BBC Radio 1.

Meanwhile, at langley

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-hostage-peter-theo-curtis-freed-in-syria/2014/08/24/aaa0d07d-37ac-407a-8753-23574383b4cf_story.html posted:

An American journalist abducted by rebels in Syria was freed Sunday after nearly two years in captivity, but his release appears to have little bearing on the fates of other hostages under threat of death from their kidnappers because of the U.S. airstrikes in Iraq.

The tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar played a key role in negotiating the release of Peter Theo Curtis, who went missing in October 2012 shortly after he crossed the Turkish border into northern Syria, U.S. officials and a statement from his family said. He was handed over to the United Nations in Syria on Sunday and is now safely out of the country, U.S. officials said...

Curtis had written about Syria and Yemen under his birth name, Theo Padnos, in publications including the New Republic, the Huffington Post and the London Review of Books.

He spoke Arabic, wrote a book about Yemen and spent the years 2007-2010 living in Syria, before the revolt against Assad. He returned again to Damascus after the 2011 uprising, writing an article for the New Republic about the underpinnings of the revolt that was critical of the government.

In the fall of 2012 he went to Turkey, the access point for journalists seeking to enter rebel-held northern Syria, and was last seen in October 2012 in the Turkish border town of Antakya, after telling colleagues that he planned to teach English in Syria.

The reference to teaching English is rapidly disappearing from almost every story about this guy lol

http://i.ur.com/Htvvrck.png
http://i.ur.com/5qaDyr3.png
http://i.ur.com/FRnBcae.png

daddyholes posted:

yeah material understanding of what's going on and skeptical treatment of propaganda. that's trash for dummies.

Hey man shutup. Prospective Employer might be reading kens feed

This immediately poses the problem of US motivation in seeking tighter
military and strategic control, unilaterally if necessary. Thomas Friedman
argues, for example, that 'there is nothing illegitimate or immoral about
the US being concerned that an evil, megalomaniacal dictator might acquire
excessive influence over the natural resource that powers the world's
industrial base'. But we have to be careful to convey to the public and
reassure the world that the intention is 'to protect the world's right to
economic survival' rather than our own right to indulge ourselves, that the
US is 'acting for the benefit of the planet, not simply to fuel American
excesses. ... If we occupy Iraq and simply install a more pro-US autocrat
to run the Iraqi gas station (as we have in other Arab oil states), then
this war partly for oil would be immoral.'16 Is the US, in short,
exercising leadership and seeking to regulate the use of Middle Eastern oil
in everyone's interests through consent? Or is it seeking domination to
realize its own far narrower strategic interests? Friedman wishes to
believe the former. But what if it is the latter?

If the US successfully engineers the overthrow of both Chavez and Saddam,
if it can stabilize or reform an armed-to-the-teeth Saudi regime that is
currently based on the shifting sands of authoritarian rule (and in
imminent danger of falling into the hands of radicalized Islam), if it can
move on (as seems it will likely seek to do) from Iraq to Iran and
consolidate a strategic military presence in the central Asian republics
and so dominate Caspian Basin oil reserves, then it might, through firm
control of the global oil spigot, hope to keep effective control over the
global economy for the next fifty years. Europe and Japan, as well as East
and South-East Asia (now crucially including China) are heavily dependent
on Gulf oil, and these are regional configurations of political-economic
power that now pose a challenge to US global hegemony in the worlds of
production and finance. What better way for the United States to ward off
that competition and secure its own hegemonic position than to control the
price, conditions, and distribution of the key economic resource upon which
those competitors rely? And what better way to do that than to use the one
line of force where the US still remains all-powerful-military might? There
is also a military aspect to this argument. The military runs on oil. North
Korea may have a sophisticated air-force, but it cannot use it much for
lack of fuel. Not only does the US need to ensure its own military
supplies, but any future military conflict with, say, China will be
lopsided if the US has the power to cut off the oil flow to its opponent.
But such lines of argument only make sense if the US has reason to fear
that its dominant position within global capitalism is somehow threatened.
It is to the economic rather than the military dimension to this question
that I turn in Chapter 2 of this enquiry.

Let me see if I've got this straight. Perhaps two years ago, an "informal" meeting of "veterans" of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal -- holding positions in the Bush administration -- was convened by Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. Discussed were the "lessons learned" from that labyrinthine, secret, and illegal arms-for-money-for-arms deal involving the Israelis, the Iranians, the Saudis, and the Contras of Nicaragua, among others -- and meant to evade the Boland Amendment, a congressionally passed attempt to outlaw Reagan administration assistance to the anti-communist Contras. In terms of getting around Congress, the Iran-Contra vets concluded, the complex operation had been a success -- and would have worked far better if the CIA and the military had been kept out of the loop and the whole thing had been run out of the Vice President's office.

Subsequently, some of those conspirators, once again with the financial support and help of the Saudis (and probably the Israelis and the Brits), began running a similar operation, aimed at avoiding congressional scrutiny or public accountability of any sort, out of Vice President Cheney's office. They dipped into "black pools of money," possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil dollars that have never been accounted for since the American occupation began. Some of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently funneled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadi groups ("some sympathetic to al-Qaeda") whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

All of this was being done as part of a "sea change" in the Bush administration's Middle Eastern policies aimed at rallying friendly Sunni regimes against Shiite Iran, as well as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Syrian government -- and launching secret operations to undermine, roll back, or destroy all of the above. Despite the fact that the Bush administration is officially at war with Sunni extremism in Iraq (and in the more general Global War on Terror), despite its support for the largely Shiite government, allied to Iran, that it has brought to power in Iraq, and despite its dislike for the Sunni-Shiite civil war in that country, some of its top officials may be covertly encouraging a far greater Sunni-Shiite rift in the region.

this was written in 2007