Iraq PM: We Lost 2,300 American Humvees to ISIS in Mosul Alone

[galdur]

Kuwait has uncovered an international cell that supplied Islamic State (previously ISIS/ISIL) with weapons bought in Ukraine, funds and new recruits. Six members were arrested but four others, including Australian-Lebanese nationals, remain on the run abroad.

The information came from Kuwait’s Interior Ministry, which identified the leader of the group as a 45-year-old Lebanese national, Osama Khayat. The ringleader was detained first and gave up the information about the rest of the members during interrogation, the ministry said in a statement.

https://www.rt.com/news/322788-isis-kuwait-ukraine-weapons/

[1713471807]

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[1713471807]

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[paradoxum]

Those junior varsity guys must have watched quite a bit of GTA to be so adept at acquiring that much machinery /facepalm.

[toddtervy]

Moral of the story:  don't work for u.s.a. terrorist country.

[criptix]

Can someone please summarize how much weapons in total daesh got from iraq/us?

[toddtervy]

All weapons used to do evil seem to come from u.s. military supplies.  What are the odds...

[galdur]

Well, the Iraqis admitted abandoning in Mosul

2,300 Humvee armored vehicles
40 M1A1 Abram tanks
52 M198 Howitzer mobile gun systems
74,000 Army machine guns

That was last year and since then the Pentagon has had its hands full sending over more stuff for the Iraqis to lose/hand over and it´s anybody´s guess how much the CIA have dropped to ISIS or other terrorists that the U.S. employs in the area. It´s difficult to follow these things because the people in the U.S. that run these terrorists have no accountability at all and the mass media there is worse than useless.

[galdur]

"ISIS has captured thousands of American-supplied vehicles," said retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, a Fox News contributor. "So both sides travel in the same vehicles and use the same weapons."

"We have been the number one source of sophisticated military gear for Islamic State," Peters said "The Iraqis were only middlemen."

[galdur]

TUESDAY, NOV 17, 2015 08:48 PM GST

We created Islamic extremism: Those blaming Islam for ISIS would have supported Osama bin Laden in the ’80s

Jingoists conveniently forget the West's Cold War strategy was to arm the Islamic extremists that became al-Qaida

History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolute lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.

Gore Vidal famously referred to the USA as the United States of Amnesia. The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai put it a little more delicately, quipping, “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”

In order to understand the rise of militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida; in order to wrap our minds around their heinous, abominable attacks on civilians in the U.S., France, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Turkey, Yemen, Afghanistan and many, many more countries, we must rekindle this historical memory.

Where did violent Islamic extremism come from? In the wake of the horrific Paris attacks on Friday, November the 13, this is the question no one is asking — yet it is the most important one of all. If one doesn’t know why a problem emerged, if one cannot find its root, one will never be able to solve and uproot it.

Where did militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida come from? The answer is not as complicated as many make it out to be — but, to understand, we must delve into the history of the Cold War, the historical period lied about in the West perhaps more than any other..... more

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/17/we_created_islamic_extremism_those_blaming_islam_for_isis_would_have_supported_osama_bin_laden_in_the_80s/

[galdur]

Pentagon/CIA falsifying intelligence reports on their own creation? No shit, Sherlock.

------------------------------

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Sunday he has told top military officials to "get to the bottom" of reports that intelligence assessments have been altered to give a rosier assessment of progress in turning back the Islamic State.

Obama was responding to a report in The New York Times that the Pentagon's inspector general has expanded its probe of intelligence reports from Central Command, or CENTCOM, and that congressional committees were seeking answers about whether that intelligence had been shaded to make it appear more progress is being made. The Times reported that the Pentagon has added more investigators who have seized documents related to intelligence reports. ...

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/obama-to-pentagon-get-to-the-bottom-of-altered-islamic-state-intelligence/ar-BBnjuPI?ocid=spartandhp

[Spendulus]

Pentagon/CIA falsifying intelligence reports on their own creation? No shit, Sherlock.

------------------------------

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Sunday he has told top military officials to "get to the bottom" of reports that intelligence assessments have been altered to give a rosier assessment of progress in turning back the Islamic State.

Obama was responding to a report in The New York Times that the Pentagon's inspector general has expanded its probe of intelligence reports from Central Command, or CENTCOM, and that congressional committees were seeking answers about whether that intelligence had been shaded to make it appear more progress is being made. The Times reported that the Pentagon has added more investigators who have seized documents related to intelligence reports. ...

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/obama-to-pentagon-get-to-the-bottom-of-altered-islamic-state-intelligence/ar-BBnjuPI?ocid=spartandhp

Coming from Obama and his guys I'd believe this.  How about that, and what do all the Europeans who so loved him, have to say about that?

[galdur]

PSYCHOLOGY

Why People Keep Saying, “That’s What the Terrorists Want”

Max Abrahms
NOVEMBER 20, 2015

On September 11, 2001, I was enjoying the tail end of my summer holiday with family in Connecticut. Over the past year, I had been studying Osama bin Laden’s enigmatic fatwas as a graduate student at Oxford. At the time, al-Qaeda was not well known, so I was surprised to find that in the climate of paralyzing fear after the attacks, everyone around me professed to know exactly why this group had struck the United States.

A local soccer coach defiantly told me that practice was still on because keeping his team of eight-year olds cooped up indoors in fear is exactly what al-Qaeda secretly wanted. A cab driver told me he was going to keep taking customers from the train station because taking a few days off from work to grieve is exactly what al-Qaeda wanted.

But for the life of me, I couldn’t recall anything in bin Laden’s fatwas about playing soccer or driving cabs.

When President George W. Bush later responded by occupying Iraq in 2003, millions of Americans insisted that doing so was exactly what al Qaeda wanted. When, in 2004, Spain had the opposite reaction after the Madrid train bombings, and pulled back from that conflict, Americans told me that withdrawing from Iraq was actually what al-Qaeda wanted.

Today, a similar thing is happening with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, as politicians and pundits accuse one another of “playing into the terrorists’ hands.”

How is everyone so savvy when it comes to knowing what terrorists want?

One explanation comes from a cognitive bias called correspondent inference theory. It was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the social psychologist Edward Jones to explain the cognitive process by which an observer infers the motives of an actor.

The theory comes from the foundational work of Fritz Heider, the father of attributional theory. Heider saw individuals as “naïve psychologists” motivated by a practical concern – a need to simplify, comprehend, and predict the motives of others. Heider postulated that people process information by applying inferential rules that shape their response to behavior. In laboratory experiments, he found that we tend to attribute the behavior of others to inherent characteristics of their personality — or dispositions — rather than to external or situational factors.

Correspondent inference theory resolves a crucial question that Heider left unanswered: How does an observer infer the motives of an actor based on its behavior?

Jones showed that observers tend to interpret an actor’s objective in terms of the consequence of the action. He offered the following simple example to illustrate the observer’s assumption of similarity between the effect and objective of an actor: A boy notices his mother shut the door, and the room becomes less noisy; the correspondent inference is that she wanted quiet. The essential point is what Jones called the “attribute-effect linkage,” whereby the objectives of the actor are presumed to be encoded in the observable outcome of the behavior.

This is why soccer coaches, cab drivers, and everyone else in the world think they know what the terrorists want. People infer the motives of terrorists directly from the observable consequences of their violent behavior – not from studying the groups more scientifically.

This also helps explain why the presumed motives of terrorists seem to shift so rapidly and contradictorily. Consider that until the Paris attacks this past week, the conventional wisdom held that the group wields violence to achieve a Caliphate unadulterated by Western interference. Since the attacks, however, we’ve been told that actually the Islamic State wants to provoke the West into more military interference in order to showcase the West’s brutal behavior. Before the attacks, we were told that France is a juicy target for the Islamic State because of its failure to integrate its Muslim population. After the attacks, we are being told that the Islamic State actually wants France and the rest of the world to become even more xenophobic against Muslims on the theory that alienated moderates may be more receptive to extremism.

It’s no wonder the media are constantly talking up terrorists as “masterminds” who commit “sophisticated” attacks. Regardless of their outcome, whatever happens will invariably be seen as exactly what the terrorists want.

https://hbr.org/2015/11/why-people-keep-saying-thats-what-the-terrorists-want

[galdur]

"This Is The Most Dangerous Time Ever" Ex-CIA Boss Says US To Blame For "Scourge Without Parallel" ISIS

"I have never felt more uncomfortable than I do today," warns former CIA Director Jack Devine, saying that, with "frankly uncivilized" ISIS, there is a greater risk of violence worldwide than ever before.

According to The Hill,

“I think this is the most dangerous time in terms of sustained violence,” he said on “The Cats Roundtable” in an interview airing Sunday on New York’s AM-970.
 
“I have never felt more uncomfortable than I do today,” he told host John Catsimatidis. “Some percentage of the world today is always either unbalanced or radicalized. When you have a small group of people who are willing to lose their lives and kill anyone they can, we’re all vulnerable.”
Devine cited the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as an unprecedented threat in terms of its wanton disregard for human life...

“I dealt with terrorists in South America in the 1970s, but they never attacked innocent women and children indiscriminately,” he said.
 
“You have a group in ISIS today that is frankly uncivilized. These folks could get stronger and stronger. We basically have to destroy ISIS over there,” Devine said.
 
Devine argued that dismantling ISIS’s command structure is crucial for minimizing the danger it presents, much like al Qaeda before them.
 
“We killed three-fourths of their leadership,” he said of al Qaeda.  “We have to do the same thing with ISIS. “We have to destroy their refuge over there. When they start to lose, their recruiting numbers start to fall.”
Devine, who mainly served during the Cold War, said ISIS is a scourge without parallel because it has no concern for self-preservation.

“There is nothing that can be compared with nuclear weapons and their use,” he said of tensions between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.
 
“[But] people felt safe in the sense there was countervailing balance,” he added. “Early in our contest with the Russians, it was clear we had checks and balances.”
Finally Devine admits...

“If there’s blame to be put, it’s on our failure to have done that by this point.”

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-23/most-dangerous-time-ever-ex-cia-boss-says-us-blame-scourge-without-parallel-isis

[vero]

"This Is The Most Dangerous Time Ever" Ex-CIA Boss Says US To Blame For "Scourge Without Parallel" ISIS

"I have never felt more uncomfortable than I do today," warns former CIA Director Jack Devine, saying that, with "frankly uncivilized" ISIS, there is a greater risk of violence worldwide than ever before.

According to The Hill,

“I think this is the most dangerous time in terms of sustained violence,” he said on “The Cats Roundtable” in an interview airing Sunday on New York’s AM-970.
 
“I have never felt more uncomfortable than I do today,” he told host John Catsimatidis. “Some percentage of the world today is always either unbalanced or radicalized. When you have a small group of people who are willing to lose their lives and kill anyone they can, we’re all vulnerable.”
Devine cited the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as an unprecedented threat in terms of its wanton disregard for human life...

“I dealt with terrorists in South America in the 1970s, but they never attacked innocent women and children indiscriminately,” he said.
 
“You have a group in ISIS today that is frankly uncivilized. These folks could get stronger and stronger. We basically have to destroy ISIS over there,” Devine said.
 
Devine argued that dismantling ISIS’s command structure is crucial for minimizing the danger it presents, much like al Qaeda before them.
 
“We killed three-fourths of their leadership,” he said of al Qaeda.  “We have to do the same thing with ISIS. “We have to destroy their refuge over there. When they start to lose, their recruiting numbers start to fall.”
Devine, who mainly served during the Cold War, said ISIS is a scourge without parallel because it has no concern for self-preservation.

“There is nothing that can be compared with nuclear weapons and their use,” he said of tensions between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.
 
“[But] people felt safe in the sense there was countervailing balance,” he added. “Early in our contest with the Russians, it was clear we had checks and balances.”
Finally Devine admits...

“If there’s blame to be put, it’s on our failure to have done that by this point.”

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-23/most-dangerous-time-ever-ex-cia-boss-says-us-blame-scourge-without-parallel-isis

Yeah, just don't get the idea that I want ISIS attacking us, i'm just saying what comes around goes around.  I'm flabergasted this all such a surprise.

[galdur]

Putin Accuses Turkey Of "Backstabbing", Funding ISIS, Sees "Serious Consequences" To Ties

Moments ago Putin delivered a brief statement following the downing of the Russian jet by Turkish forces during a press conference with the King of Jordan. Here are the highlights:

PUTIN SAYS LOSS OF RUSSIAN WARPLANE TODAY DUE TO BACKSTABBING
PUTIN: DOWNED WARPLANE INCIDENT GOES BEYOND FIGHT VS TERROR
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT PUTIN SAYS TURKEY BEHAVING AS IF RUSSIA SHOT DOWN ITS OWN PLANE
PUTIN SAYS INCIDENT TO HAVE SERIOUS CONSQUENCES FOR TURKEY TIES
PUTIN SAYS RUSSIAN WARPLANE IN NO WAY THREATENED TURKEY
PUTIN SAYS RUSSIA HAS SIGNED AN ACCORD WITH THE US TO AVOID AIR INCIDENTS
Putin makes it quite clear that Turkey, a NATO state, is responsible for ISIS funding:

PUTIN: OIL FROM ISLAMIC STATE IS BEING SHIPPED TO TURKEY
PUTIN SAYS ISLAMIC STATE GETS CASH BY SELLING OIL TO TURKEY
PUTIN: ISLAMIC STATE GETS MILITARY SUPPORT FROM MANY STATES
And the first official diplomatic escalation:

TURKISH DEFENCE ATTACHE IN MOSCOW SUMMONED TO RUSSIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY - TASS
Some more from Russia's Gazeta:


Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Turkey's appeal to NATO partners to the incident with the Russian Su-24 looks like an attempt to put the alliance at the service of an "Islamic state."
 
"We will analyze everything that happened, the tragedy would have serious consequences, including for the Russian-Turkish relations. I do not know who needed what is done today, but in any case not to us. And instead of immediately establish the necessary contacts with us, the Turkish side asked its NATO partners to discuss the incident, as if it were we shot down a Turkish plane, but they are not us. Do they want to put NATO at the service of ISIS? "- Putin said.
 
Earlier, Putin said that the incident with the Su-24 in Syria - a stab in the back, which caused us accomplices of terrorists.
 
The Su-24 has fallen in the Syrian province of Latakia. Earlier, the Turkish side took out Russian warnings for violating Turkish airspace during a military operation in Syria.
 
"Islamic State" - a terrorist organization banned in several countries, including Russia.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-24/putin-accuses-turkey-backstabbing-funding-isis-sees-serious-consequences-ties

[galdur]

Paddy Ashdown: UK failing to pressure Gulf states over jihadist funding

Lord Ashdown has accused the government of failing to put pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states which he said were funding jihadism.

The former Lib Dem leader told the Today programme he worried that the "closeness" of the Conservative party to Gulf interests was hampering the effort to tackle extremism.

"The failure to put pressure on the Gulf States - and especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar - first of all to stop funding the Salafists and Wahabists, and secondly to play a larger part in this campaign... leads me to worry about the closeness between the Conservative Party and rich Arab, Gulf individuals,” he told presenter John Humphrys.

"Will he launch an inquiry into the funding of jihadism? If not, I think we're entitled to ask some questions about why not."

Release date: 24 November 2015

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p038zy22

[galdur]

'We will be coming, we will come to crush your country': Homegrown French ISIS fighters issue warning to François Hollande with chilling threat of new attacks on France

French ISIS fighters have issued chilling threat of new attacks on France
Footage also includes a warning to French President François Hollande
It follows other videos released in the past week threatening similar attacks
One had threat to blow up White House, other a suicide bomb in New York

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3332376/French-ISIS-fighters-issue-warning-Fran-ois-Hollande-chilling-threat-new-attacks-France.html

[galdur]

Recap: Newly-Declassified U.S. Government Documents: The West Supported the Creation of ISIS

The documents were written by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency on August 12, 2012

Redacted, redacted and more redacted...

https://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf

AQI= al Queda in Iraq, ISIS is basically a revamping of that

[galdur]

I guess glaring similarities between Saudi methods and those of the Islamic State – both have a peculiar fondness for beheadings – are harder and harder to ignore for most people. But with Saudi executions now running at triple the 2014 rate according to Amnesty International, the Saudis are pressing on regardless. And why shouldn´t they; their big friends in Paris and London are fawning at their feet like never before and crawling over each other to sell them weapons. Uncle Sam seems to be giving up on those fruitcakes and Cameron and Hollande are desperate to replace it as the Saudi´s very best and dearest friends. Like seeks like. Must be the mentality that attracts these people to each other. That and oil and weapons sales.

[galdur]

Former DIA Chief Michael Flynn Says Rise of Islamic State was “a willful decision” and Defends Accuracy of 2012 Memo

August 6, 2015 by Brad Hoff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG3j8OYKgn4

In Al Jazeera’s latest Head to Head episode, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn confirms to Mehdi Hasan that not only had he studied the DIA memo predicting the West’s backing of an Islamic State in Syria when it came across his desk in 2012, but even asserts that the White House’s sponsoring of radical jihadists (that would emerge as ISIL and Nusra) against the Syrian regime was “a willful decision.”
Amazingly, Flynn actually took issue with the way interviewer Mehdi Hasan posed the question—Flynn seemed to want to make it clear that the policies that led to the rise of ISIL were not merely the result of ignorance or looking the other way, but the result of conscious decision making:

Hasan: You are basically saying that even in government at the time you knew these groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?
Flynn: I think the administration.
Hasan: So the administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?
Flynn: I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.
Hasan: A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?
Flynn: It was a willful decision to do what they’re doing.

Hasan himself expresses surprise at Flynn’s frankness during this portion of the interview. While holding up a paper copy of the 2012 DIA report declassified through FOIA, Hasan reads aloud key passages such as, “there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria, and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”

Rather than downplay the importance of the document and these startling passages, as did the State Department soon after its release, Flynn does the opposite: he confirms that while acting DIA chief he “paid very close attention” to this report in particular and later adds that “the intelligence was very clear.”
Lt. Gen. Flynn, speaking safely from retirement, is the highest ranking intelligence official to go on record saying the United States and other state sponsors of rebels in Syria knowingly gave political backing and shipped weapons to Al-Qaeda in order to put pressure on the Syrian regime:

Hasan: In 2012 the U.S. was helping coordinate arms transfers to those same groups [Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda in Iraq], why did you not stop that if you’re worried about the rise of quote-unquote Islamic extremists?
Flynn: I hate to say it’s not my job…but that…my job was to…was to to ensure that the accuracy of our intelligence that was being presented was as good as it could be.

The early reporting that treated the DIA memo as newsworthy and hugely revelatory was criticized and even mocked by some experts, as well as outlets like The Daily Beast. Yet the very DIA director at the time the memo was drafted and circulated widely now unambiguously confirms the document to be of high value, and indicates that it served as source material in his own discussions over Syria policy with the White House.
As Michael Flynn also previously served as director of intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during a time when its prime global mission was dismantling Al-Qaeda, his honest admission that the White House was in fact arming and bolstering Al-Qaeda linked groups in Syria is especially shocking given his stature.
Consider further the dissonance that comes with viewing the Pentagon’s former highest ranking intelligence officer in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden now calmly and coolly confessing that the United States directly aided the foot soldiers of Ayman al-Zawahiri beginning in at least 2012 in Syria.

This confirmation is significant to my own coverage of the DIA report, as I was contacted by a number of individuals who attempted to assure me that the true experts and “insiders” knew the document was unimportant and therefore irrelevant within the intelligence community and broader Syria policy.
This began after a Daily Beast article entitled The ISIS Conspiracy That Ate the Web  cited former NSA officer John Schindler as an expert source. Schindler concluded of the DIA document: “it’s difficult to say much meaningful about it… Nothing special here, not one bit.”

To my surprise, only hours after I published a rebuttal of Schindler and the Daily Beast article, I was contacted by a current high level CIA official who is also a personal friend from my time living in the D.C. area.
This official, who spent most of his career with CIA Public Affairs, made a personal appeal urging me to drop my comments attacking John Schindler’s credibility, as I had noted that Schindler is a highly ideological and scandal-laden commentator who consistently claims special insider knowledge in support of his arguments. This CIA official further attempted to convince me of Schindler’s credibility as an insider and expert, assuring me that “he has written insightfully.”

Mehdi Hasan’s historic interview with General Flynn should put the issue to rest—the declassified DIA report is now confirmed to be a central and vital source that sheds light on the origins of ISIS, and must inform a candid national debate on American policy in Syria and Iraq.
As it is now already becoming part of the official record on conflict in Syria among respected international historians, knowledge of the declassified document must make it into every American household.

http://levantreport.com/2015/08/06/former-dia-chief-michael-flynn-says-rise-of-islamic-state-was-a-willful-decision-and-defends-accuracy-of-2012-memo/

[pattu1]

I guess glaring similarities between Saudi methods and those of the Islamic State – both have a peculiar fondness for beheadings – are harder and harder to ignore for most people. But with Saudi executions now running at triple the 2014 rate according to Amnesty International, the Saudis are pressing on regardless. And why shouldn´t they; their big friends in Paris and London are fawning at their feet like never before and crawling over each other to sell them weapons. Uncle Sam seems to be giving up on those fruitcakes and Cameron and Hollande are desperate to replace it as the Saudi´s very best and dearest friends. Like seeks like. Must be the mentality that attracts these people to each other. That and oil and weapons sales.

ISIS should just go ahead and merge with Saudi Arabia.
Then they can carry on with their activities undisturbed.