WikiLeaks: US, Israel, And Saudi Arabia Planned To Overthrow Syrian Govt. In 2006

Speaking from Ecuador’s embassy in London, Julian Assange revealed that the United States planned to overthrow the Syrian government as far back as 2006, several years before the start of the current crisis.

The founder of WikiLeaks took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in 2012. The premises remain under siege 24 hours a day by a large team of police to prevent Assange from ever stepping foot outside, at a cost to taxpayers that now exceeds £12 million.

The ongoing threat to his freedom hasn’t kept Assange from continuing his work revealing the dirty secrets of world governments. His latest revelations come in an interview with RT in support of his new book, “The WikiLeaks Files,” published late last month.

The United States and its allies in the Middle East, including Turkey andIsrael, have been frequently accused of contributing to the ongoing destabilization of Syria in the wake of the uprising and subsequent civil war which began in 2011. But according to cables from the WikiLeaks archive, discussed in the Syria chapter of Assange’s book, plans to deliberately destabilize the region go back at least five years further.

“In that chapter is a cable from US Ambassador William Roebuck, who was stationed in Damascus, which apparently discusses a plan for the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria,” RT reported.

In his appearance on the RT program “Going Underground,” Assange elaborated on the cable’s contents:

“… That plan was to use a number of different factors to create paranoia within the Syrian government; to push it to overreact, to make it fear there’s a coup …”

Assange continued, explaining that the U.S. government sought to make the Syrian government appear weak by causing Assad to overreact to the threat of Islamic extremists crossing into his country.

The cable also details plans to foster sectarian strife in the region and make Iran appear like a larger threat to Assad than it really was, Assange continued:

“In particular, to take rumors that are known to be false … or exaggerations and promote them – that Iran is trying to convert poor Sunnis, and to work with Saudi and Egypt to foster that perception in order to make it harder for Iran to have influence, and also harder for the government to have influence in the population.”

WikiLeaks cables reveal that these plans came from the Israeli government, and show that the U.S. government intended to work with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Egypt to encourage the breakdown of the Assad regime as a way of also weakening Iran and Hezbollah.

“[I]f Syria sufficiently destabilized, it might be in a position where it can keep the Golan Heights forever, or even advance that territory,” Assange said.

According to Assange, the cable illuminates how the current Syrian crisis reflects U.S. influence on the Middle East, particularly the ways it has used its allies to put pressure on the country. “Part of the problem in Syria is that you have a number of US allies surrounding it, principally Saudi and Qatar, that are funneling in weapons,” Assange noted, adding that it shows how the U.S. uses its over 100 army bases and network of embassies to further its imperialist interests.

The mainstream media often presents a simplistic view of the Syrian crisis, especially when the U.S. government is using it as support for war, ignoring the history of the region and the many conflicting alliances it holds.

MintPress News founder Mnar Muhawesh published her analysis of the current refugee crisis, which also blames Western allies like Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia for seeking to destabilize Syria in their quest to control the region’s energy resources.

“Today, the Middle East is being torn to shreds by manipulative plans to gain oil and gas access by pitting people against one another based on religion,” Muhawesh wrote. “And in this push for energy, it’s the people who suffer most.”

Watch “Assange on ‘US Empire’, Assad govt overthrow plans & new book ‘The WikiLeaks Files’ (EXCLUSIVE)” from RT’s “Going Underground”:

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This article (WikiLeaks: US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia Planned to Overthrow Syrian Govt. in 2006) originally appeared on MintPressNews.com and was used with permission. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

United States Exposed For Being Complicit In Arming And Training Child Soldiers In Afghanistan

Washington, D.C. — The killing of a 10-year-old Afghan boy, Wasil Ahmad by Taliban forces has raised serious questions about the United State’s creation and backing of a militia group using of child soldiers.

Ahmad has been lionized as a national hero in Afghanistan after his death on Monday in the Uruzgan province at the hands of Taliban militants. The boy had previously gained national prominence for helping militia forces break an insurgent siege after his uncle had been wounded.

Ahmad’s death, while fighting alongside his uncle, with a U.S. supported government militia called the Afghan Local Police (ALP) has thrust the grim practice of child soldiers in combat into the international spotlight once again.

“There’s nothing heroic about putting a child in danger by arming him and having him fight in a war. The Taliban killed 10-year-old Wasil Ahmad, but those who encouraged him to fight bear responsibility as well,” Patricia Gossman, the senior Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, told The Guardian.

Afghan government officials said Ahmad was not formally part of the Afghan Local Police, but his uncle, with whom he fought alongside, was an official member of the group, according to The Guardian

According to a report by The Guardian:

Created in 2010, the Afghan Local Police, known as ALP, is largely an invention of the US military, and was initially overseen by elite US special operations forces. Critics have long pointed to persistent human-rights abuse allegations within an entity they fear provides cover for the empowerment of militias.

According to a US government audit in October, the US Defense Department has provided $469.7m to the ALP from inception through April 2015, and estimates that the force will cost approximately $121m annually to sustain.

The same audit chided the Pentagon for lacking plans to disband the ALP or transition its 30,000 fighters to the official security services after US sponsorship ends, a switch currently slated for September.

When asked by The Guardian for comment about the U.S. funding militia groups that field child soldiers, the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command both refused to comment, with the Pentagon directing attention to a State Department policy on aid to foreign militaries.

“Consistent with US law and policy, the Department of State vets its assistance to foreign security forces, as well as certain Department of Defense training programs, to ensure that recipients have not committed gross human rights abuses. When the vetting process uncovers credible information that an individual or unit has committed a gross violation of human rights, US assistance is withheld.”

Afghan interior minister Sediq Sediqqi said that recruitment of children is against official policy and that it’s a crime to use child soldiers. The spokesman for the Uruzgan provincial governor noted that while Ahmad was not an official member of the ALP, he took up arms to avenge the deaths of 16 family members that had all been members of the ALP and had been killed by the Taliban.

“Recruiting child soldiers violates international law and Afghan law, but tragically it’s been a longstanding practice by some Afghan militias and ALP. Even though some of these forces get US support, there has been little effort to hold abusive commanders accountable for such crimes. It’s high time the Afghan government matched its words with action to end the practice of recruiting child soldiers,” said Human Rights Watch’s Gossman.

The idea of U.S. funding going to directly to groups that employ children soldiers is repugnant and shocking to the conscience. When policy becomes more important than morality, people suffer.

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Jay Syrmopoulos is a political analyst, free thinker, researcher, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs. Jay’s work has been published on Ben Swann’s Truth in Media, Truth-Out, Raw Story, MintPress News, as well as many other sites. You can follow him on Twitter @sirmetropolis, on Facebook at Sir Metropolis and now on tsu.

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The US Has Been Giving Afghan Children Violent Books To Indoctrinate Them To Jihad – It Worked

The Unites States government has played a crucial role in the development of the complex and volatile political situation that now exists in the Middle East, and they have had a heavy hand in influencing the region since the first world war.

From propping up dictators to funding rebel groups for regime change, the U.S. and their allies have been creating monsters in the Middle East for generations. Western involvement in the region became more pronounced and more militarized during the Cold War, where the western allies and the Soviets fought proxy wars all over the world.

Afghanistan was one of the primary battlegrounds where these proxy wars took place, and at the time, the U.S. military was supplying militants in Afganistan with training and weapons to be used against the Soviets who also had political and strategic interests in the region.

The tactics used by the U.S. government extended far beyond traditional warfare and entered the realm of psychological warfare. From the Cold War period until very recently, the U.S. government spent millions of dollars supplying Afghan schoolchildren with propagandized textbooks that had violent images and militant jihadi teachings. The motive behind this propaganda was to actually radicalize the Afghan children so they would be more willing to fight against the Soviets when they got older.

According to the Washington Post, the textbooks were published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu and developed in the early 1980’s at a cost of $51 million.

The schoolbooks were even approved by the Taliban because the teachings were not far off from their own worldview.

This propaganda effort was only made public after the U.S. government went to war in Afghanistan in 2002 and it was revealed through the media that the western curriculum being taught in Afghan schools was actually promoting jihad.

At the time, President Bush was forced to respond to the scandal, and he promised that the curriculum would be changed to reflect a more peaceful worldview. Bush promised that 10 million textbooks with updated curriculum would be sent to Afghan schools and he claimed that the new books would teach “respect for human dignity, instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.”

Chris Brown, head of book revision for AID’s Central Asia Task Force admitted that the textbooks were initially designed as anti-soviet propaganda.

“I think we were perfectly happy to see these books trashing the Soviet Union,” Brown said.

Although, he added the ideas in the textbooks were updated for a new era.

“We turned it from a wartime curriculum to a peacetime curriculum,” he said of the new books.

The textbooks had reportedly portrayed the society in Afghanistan of having a “warrior culture” that was destined to fight a holy war.

Ahmad Fahim Hakim, an Afghan teacher who is very familiar with the books explained that “The pictures [in] the texts are horrendous to school students, but the texts are even much worse.”

Many experts claim that these books are still in use today in Afghan schools, despite efforts from UNICEF to destroy them and replace them with their newer versions.

According to a recent report from the Post, Dana Burde, an assistant professor of international education at New York University, says the Taliban is reprinting and using old U.S.-sponsored jihadist books to influence children in areas where the militants still hold sway. Burde says she found multiple reprinted copies of some of the texts, including a 2011 edition in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.

As images of ISIS beheading their victims dressed in orange jumpsuits are plastered on televisions across the nation, and knowing that the US has been teaching this to children, hot air from the establishment decrying these acts rings hollow.

Any government who would use innocent children as pawns and teach them to become vicious killers, for their own personal gain, is far beyond criminal…it’s downright evil.

John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can purchase his books, or get your own book published at his website www.JohnVibes.com.

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