Tag Archives: globalist

US intelligence admits Syria arms aid goes to Al Qaeda

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By Bill Van Auken

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.

Moreover, it is utilizing the same forces to pursue its quest for regime-change in Syria, which is, in turn, aimed at weakening Iran and preparing for a US-Israeli war against that country. And, as the Times article indicates, an even more spectacular form of “blowback” is being prepared.

The Times quotes an unnamed American official familiar with US intelligence findings as saying, “The opposition groups that are receiving most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it.”

The article points to the role of the Sunni monarchies in Qatar and Saudi Arabia in funneling weaponry to hard-line Islamists, based upon their own religious sectarian agendas in the region, which are aimed at curtailing the influence of Shia-dominated Iran.

It attributes the failure of CIA personnel deployed at the Turkish-Syrian border in attempting to vet groups receiving weapons to a “lack of good intelligence about many rebel figures and factions.”

What the article fails to spell out, however, is precisely what “secular opposition groups” exist in Syria that the US wants to arm. The Turkish-based leaderships of the National Syrian Council and the Free Syrian Army have little influence and are largely discredited inside Syria.

A report issued by the International Crisis Group (ICG) on October 12 entitled “Tentative Jihad, Syria’s Fundamentalist Opposition” suggests that the so-called “secularist” armed opposition does not exist. It notes that, “the presence of a powerful Salafi strand among Syria’s rebels has become irrefutable,” along with a “slide toward ever-more radical and confessional discourse and… brutal tactics.”

It cites the increasingly prominent role played by groups like Jabhat al-Nusra [the Support Front] and Kata’ib Ahrar al-Sham [the Freemen of Syria Battalions],” both of which unambiguously embraced the language of jihad and called for replacing the regime with an Islamic state based on Salafi principles.”

Finally, it attributes the rising influence of these elements to “the lack of moderate, effective clerical and political leadership,” under conditions in which more moderate Sunni elements have opposed the so-called “rebels.”

“Overall, the absence of an assertive, pragmatic leadership, coupled with spiraling, at times deeply sectarian, violence inevitably played into more hard-line hands,” the ICG report concludes.

Increasingly, elements within the US ruling establishment are citing the growing influence of the Islamist militias in Syria as a justification for a direct US military intervention. Representative of this view is Jackson Diehl, the Washington Post’s chief foreign affairs editor and a prominent advocate of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. In an October 14 column, Diehl describes the situation in Syria as “an emerging strategic disaster” attributable to Obama’s “self-defeating caution in asserting American power.”

“Fixed on his campaign slogan that ‘the tide of war is receding’ in the Middle East,” Diehl writes, “Obama claims that intervention would only make the conflict worse—and then watches as it spreads to NATO ally Turkey and draws in hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters.”

Chiding Romney and the Republicans for focusing on the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Diehl notes that this is easier than asking “war-weary Americans” to contemplate yet another war of aggression. Nonetheless, he suggests, once the election is over, such a war will be on the agenda, no matter who sits in the White House.

JP Morgan overvalued by $150 billion, US Banks told to prepare for collapse

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The below post written on Daily Bail elaborates on a new PDF which outlines a “hypothetical” liquidation scenario for globalist superbank, JP Morgan.  It has been well documented that JP Morgan’s market valuation is highly dependent upon manipulation of commodity’s futures and the inflationary derivative ponzi – and it would only be a matter of time before hard reality caught up with the house of cards.  If you haven’t been following this development, it has been in the works for quite some time:

Golden-Rule.org posts on JP Morgan’s ticking timebomb

Source: DailyBail.com

Reuters published an exclusive story this morning:

Buried in the final paragraph:

In a presentation in March, JPMorgan Chase said it had a recovery plan in place and said it was ordered by regulators. The presentation was organized by Harvard Law School and was closed to the media at the time, but is now available online.

Here’s the BEST part of the JPM document.

It’s easy to see on the PDF:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/about/pifs/symposia/europe/baer.pdf

Go to page 9.  Under the wipeout scenario JPM describes a $50 billion trading loss turning into a $200 billion loss as soon as the FDIC takes over.  Why… ? Because JPM says they would expect the FDIC to immediately writedown JPM’s assets by an additional $150 billion.

Holy mark to bullshit

Jamie Dimon just admitted to the world that JPM is mis-marking assets to the tune of $150 billion.

It gets better. Go to page 10.  The chart shows that they only have $184 billion in equity, minus the $50 billion loss, minus ‘the $150 billion fdic reality adjustment’, which leaves them in a negative equity position of (-$16 billion).

So, we can extrapolate that without this phantom loss of $50 billion, JPM’s real equity position is just $34 billion currently, not the $184 billion on their books.

See STEP 2 in the figure below:

 

Look at the far right column EQUITY in the figure below:

“Catch Me If You Can” JPMorgue Has 11+ State, Fed & Int’l Enforcement Bodies After It

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The Morgue is like Leonardo Dicaprio in the movie “Catch Me If You Can.”  The bank has amassed a laundry list of fraudulent activities that have burst onto the radars of numerous governmental agencies and into the public spotlight. Probably, we are looking at a similar outcome as in the movie. Instead of prosecutions, the bank, like Dicaprio’s character in the movie, will probably be merely asked to go to work for the Feds in some capacity to “pay off” their wrongdoings.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is being investigated by at least 11 state, federal and international enforcement bodies. Officials in Singapore, Germany and Japan are among a list of agencies probing the largest U.S. bank and its trading errors, according to JP Morgan in a filing Thursday.  The U.S. Justice Department, Congress, Securities and Exchange Commission and U.K. Financial Services Authority are all examining the bank, which  could still lose $1.7 billion more on its credit derivatives portfolio, the company said.

“The firm expects heightened scrutiny by its regulators of its compliance with new and existing regulations,” the company said. Regulators will begin to bring “formal enforcement actions for violations of law rather than resolving those violations through informal supervisory processes.”

The Morgue might have escaped the breaking down of their silver manipulation scheme by the CFTC, but that hasn’t kept other U.S. regulators from keeping the pressure on as the bank has been forced to shave 50 basis points off its reported capital levels after having sustained four weeks of trading losses in the second quarter, this on the heels of their “London Whale”  loss reported by the bank earlier in the year. The Morgue said Thursday in a regulatory filing that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Office of the Comptroller “determined” on Wednesday that the bank should amend its reported regulatory capital ratios.

The regulatory directive “relates to an adjustment to the firm’s regulatory capital ratios to reflect regulatory guidance regarding a limited number of market risk models used for certain positions held by the firm during the first quarter, including the CIO synthetic credit portfolio,” according to The Morgue.
The bank’s reported Basel I tier one common equity ratio has been revised to 9.8 percent, down from the 10.3 percent originally reported, the investment bank said. This tier I capital represents a key measure of JPMorgan’s ability to absorb losses.
JP Morgan also stated that it lost money on 28 days in the second quarter after the CIO positions were in the process of being unwound. In the first quarter, the bank sustained but one day of losses. The bank has received many requests for documents related to the trading loss from US politicians and regulators like the OCC, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Justice and the UK’s Financial Services Authority.

Jamie Dimon might have long celebrated The Morgue’s “fortress balance sheet” and its excellent risk management, especially as the bank maneuvered the 2007-2009 financial crisis after which many major financials have not even realized half of their pre-crisis market value, but those days are over, and Dimon has been revealed as the Lord Blankfein character he always has been.