Copeland interviewed in 1969,was reflecting ruefully on the disaster they had created in Syria. His is the voice of a generation of Americans who had tried to intervene to bring democracy to the Middle East – not just in Syria but later in Iran and in Nasser’s Egypt. The “Game” he refers to is a management game-playing exercise the CIA did in the 1950s when planning the interventions. It’s aim was to predict how all the “players” in the country would behave,but the predictions were wrong!Za’im promised the Americans he would throw all the corrupt politicians in jail, reform the country, recognize the new state of Israel, and then bring in proper democracy. All the Americans were convinced that it was a brilliant plan – except for one man, a young political officer called Deane Hinton. Copeland describes a moment when they were out in Damascus planning the coup when Hinton turned to the rest of the group and said:”I want to go on record as saying that this is the stupidest, most irresponsible action a diplomatic mission like ours could get itself involved in, and that we’ve started a series of these things that will never end.” ( Deane Hinton, Political officer, US Embassy in Syria, 1947. Hinton had been right,speaking to the American CIA which had “opened the door to the Dark Ages” in Syria back then).
Deane was promptly kicked out of the group and ostracized . The coup happened in March 1949. It was the first post-war military coup in the Middle East.
The “Game” is a management game-playing exercise the CIA did in the 1950s when planning the interventions, when most of the Syrian people were terrified of America, not just because of the interventions and the coup, but also because of their support for Israel so they have turned to the Soviets as a message to America. They also see Israel as America’s agent.
Another military coup, in 1957 code-named Operation Wappen.
The CIA man in charge was called Howard “Rocky” Stone, and he terrified the Syrians because he always stared intensely at them. The Syrians had uncovered the CIA plot to overthrow the government. Three CIA men had been expelled, and even Wyatt has to admit in the commentary that the evidence for the plot is strong.
In 1963 in Syria,the favorite gag “joke” was that the coup will only happen when the western media arrive. In that:the plotters are waiting for the Panorama reporter to turn up because they know that coup will not be real until it is reported by the west.It is an early example of the techno-orientalism that is being repeated today in the media’s firm belief that it is the western social media networks that made possible the rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt.
In 1963,while in Iraq another CIA coup was harvesting the results,the Syrian Baathists weren’t going to be outclassed. A month later they mounted their coup, and this time without the CIA’s help. Hafez al-Assad was one of the leaders.
The dream of Baathism in Syria was to overcome the sectarianism that had always riven the Arab world, to create a secular society in which everyone was included!The hatred was deep because when the French ruled the country they had practiced a program of divide and rule which deliberately fomented and exaggerated the sectarian divisions in the country.
Ben Fenton wrote for The Guardian on Saturday 27 September 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/sep/27/uk.syria1
“Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive “regime change” in another Arab country they accused of spreading terror and threatening the west’s oil supplies, by planning the invasion of Syria and the assassination of leading figures.
Newly discovered documents show how in 1957 Harold Macmillan and President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria’s pro-western neighbors, and then to “eliminate” the most influential triumvirate in Damascus.
The plans, frighteningly frank in their discussion, were discovered in the private papers of Duncan Sandys, Mr Macmillan’s defense secretary, by Matthew Jones, a reader in international history at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Although historians know that intelligence services had sought to topple the Syrian regime in the autumn of 1957, this is the first time any document has been found showing that the assassination of three leading figures was at the heart of the scheme. In the document drawn up by a top secret and high-level working group that met in Washington in September 1957, Mr Macmillan and President Eisenhower were left in no doubt about the need to assassinate the top men in Damascus.
Part of the “preferred plan” reads: “In order to facilitate the action of liberative forces, reduce the capabilities of the Syrian regime to organize and direct its military actions, to hold losses and destruction to a minimum, and to bring about desired results in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals. Their removal should be accomplished early in the course of the uprising and intervention and in the light of circumstances existing at the time.”
The document, approved by London and Washington, named three men: Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, head of Syrian military intelligence; Afif al-Bizri, chief of the Syrian general staff; and Khalid Bakdash, leader of the Syrian Communist party.
For a prime minister who had largely come to power on the back of Anthony Eden’s disastrous antics in Suez just a year before, Mr Macmillan was remarkably bellicose. He described it in his diary as “a most formidable report”. Secrecy was so great, Mr Macmillan ordered the plan withheld even from British chiefs of staff, because of their tendency “to chatter”.
Concern about the increasingly anti-western and pro-Soviet sympathies of Syria had been growing in Downing Street and the White House since the overthrow of the conservative military regime of Colonel Adib Shishakli by an alliance of Ba’ath party and Communist party politicians and their allies in the Syrian army, in 1954.
Driving the call for action was the CIA’s Middle East chief Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of former president Theodore Roosevelt. He identified Colonel Sarraj, General al-Bizri and Mr Bakdash as the real power behind a figurehead president. The triumvirate had moved even closer to Nikita Khrushchev’s orbit after the previous year’s disastrous attempt by Britain and France, in collusion with Israel, to reverse the nationalization of the Suez canal.
By 1957, despite America’s opposition to the Suez move, President Eisenhower felt he could no longer ignore the danger of Syria becoming a center for Moscow to spread communism throughout the Middle East. He and Mr Macmillan feared Syria would destabilize pro-western neighbors by exporting terrorism and encouraging internal dissent. More importantly, Syria also had control of one of the main oil arteries of the Middle East, the pipeline which connected pro-western Iraq’s oilfields to Turkey.
The “preferred plan”adds: “Once a political decision is reached to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria, CIA is prepared, and SIS [MI6] will attempt, to mount minor sabotage and coup de main incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals.
“The two services should consult, as appropriate, to avoid any overlapping or interference with each other’s activities… Incidents should not be concentrated in Damascus; the operation should not be overdone; and to the extent possible care should be taken to avoid causing key leaders of the Syrian regime to take additional personal protection measures.”
Sabotage
The report said that once the necessary degree of fear had been created, frontier incidents and border clashes would be staged to provide a pretext for Iraqi and Jordanian military intervention. Syria had to be “made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighboring governments,” the report says. “CIA and SIS should use their capabilities in both the psychological and action fields to augment tension.” That meant operations in Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon, taking the form of “sabotage, national conspiracies and various strong-arm activities” to be blamed on Damascus.
The plan called for funding of a “Free Syria Committee”, and the arming of “political factions with paramilitary or other actionist capabilities” within Syria. The CIA and MI6 would instigate internal uprisings, for instance by the Druze in the south, help to free political prisoners held in the Mezze prison, and stir up the Muslim Brotherhood in Damascus.
The planners envisaged replacing the Ba’ath/Communist regime with one that was firmly anti-Soviet, but they conceded that this would not be popular and “would probably need to rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power”.
The plan was never used, chiefly because Syria’s Arab neighbors could not be persuaded to take action and an attack from Turkey alone was thought to be unacceptable. The following year, the Ba’athists moved against their Communist former allies and took Syria into a federation with Gen Nasser’s Egypt, which lasted until 1963.”
In 2002,Asia Times has revealed information about another American secret agency P20G:
“‘P2OG’ allows Pentagon to fight dirtyBy David IsenbergNov 5, 2002Asia Times“Run away from the light”: Such might be the motto of a new, covert policy that the Bush administration is considering implementing. According to recent news reports, it would be the largest expansion into the world of black ops and covert action since the end of the Vietnam War in the 1970s.And that’s saying quite a lot, considering that since Vietnam the Pentagon has not exactly been dormant in this area.As well-known military analyst William Arkin pointed out in an October 27 column in the Los Angeles Times, the development of the Pentagon’s covert counter-terror capability has its roots in the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The army created a highly compartmentalized organization that could collect clandestine intelligence independent of the rest of the US intelligence community, and follow through with covert military action. Today, it operates under the code name Grey Fox. In Afghanistan it operated alongside the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) paramilitary Special Activities Division and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command.Then there are numerous recent initiatives, such as net assessment capabilities at combatant commands, a new campaign support group at Fort Bragg, a counter-terrorism Technology Support Office, to name just a few.Yet the Pentagon wants more. Its Defense Science Board (DSB) conducted a 2002 “Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism”. Excerpts from that study, dated August 16, were leaked and obtained by the Federation of American Scientists, which posted them on their website. The report was produced by a 10-member panel of military experts that included Vice Admiral William O Studeman, former director of the National Security Agency.
According to the leak, the United States is engaged in a global war on terrorism that is “a real war” in case anyone doubts it. This means, among other things, a “committed, resourceful and globally dispersed adversary with strategic reach” against whom the US will wage “a long, at times violent, and border less war” which “requires new strategies, postures and organization”.That explains why the United States has, so to speak, decided to fight fire with fire. Although the study is filled with lots of the usual buzzwords and phrases that Pentagon planners love, such as “robust connectivity, agile ground forces, adaptive joint command and control and discriminant use of force”, one thing that does stand out is its call for “preemption/proaction/interdiction/disruption/quick-response capabilities”.This is consistent with the administration’s new National Security Strategy, which called for preemption; indeed, since the DSB study preceded the release of the strategy, it is possible that the strategy was written to incorporate some of its aspects.The study urges the Pentagon to “take the terrorist threat as seriously as it takes the likelihood and consequences of major theater war”, urging officials to launch secret missions and intelligence operations to penetrate and disrupt terrorist cells abroad. Some of those operations should be aimed at signaling to countries that harbor terrorists that “their sovereignty will be at risk”.
…lawmakers have expressed concern with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s push to expand the Pentagon’s covert capabilities, mainly because the Pentagon is not subject to rules that require the CIA to report its covert activities to Congress.The DSB summary document suggests that many changes are already under way. It cites the expansion of existing intelligence analysis centers and the creation of new management teams to direct covert operations at such installations as Fort Bragg, where US special forces such as Delta Force are based.It recommends the creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and deception. For example, the Pentagon and CIA would work together to increase human intelligence (HUMINT) forward/operational presence and to deploy new clandestine technical capabilities.To bolster government HUMINT capabilities, the task force advances the idea of an intelligence “surge/unsurge” capability – a “robust, global cadre of retirees, reservists and others who are trained and qualified to serve on short notice, including expatriates”. This group could be pressed into service during times of crisis.P2OG would launch secret operations aimed at “stimulating reactions” among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction, meaning it would prod terrorist cells into action, thus exposing them to “quick-response” attacks by US forces. The means by which it would do this is the far greater use of special operations forces.Responsibility and accountability for the P2OG would be vested in a “Special Operations Executive” in the National Security Council (NSC). The NSC would plan operations but not oversee their execution in order to avoid comparisons to past abuses, such as the Iran-Contra operations run out of the NSC by Oliver North during the Reagan administration. Under the board’s proposal, NSC plans would be executed by the Pentagon or the CIA.Costs would include developing new means to enable “deep penetration of adversaries” ($1.7 billion annually); exercises and gaming ($100 million annually); development of technical capabilities and the hiring of 500 new staff ($800 million annually); establishment of centers of excellence to handle increased workload ($500 million annually); and expansion of the Joint Forces net assessment activity ($100 million annually). The total cost is envisaged as $3.3 billion.
But…when the “terrorists” they were designed to fight against are their own creation,Al Qaeda and when the target area is the richest one in gas and oil or just an impediment in the way of developing the plan of pipelines which will transport the mineral resources who is to be considered the real TERRORIST!? USA’ strategy: provoke violent extremist groups into retaliating (remember the “snipers shooting the peaceful”?which sparked terrorists into action) – by killing their family members? luring them with loot? fueling them with drugs? plying them with jihad propaganda?:civilian-slaughtering invasions and incursions into sovereign territory or with agents provocateurs, perhaps, who infiltrate groups then plan and direct the attacks themselves? Being unable to confront directly the war machine because it was vetoed at UN – the largest, most advanced military force in the history of the world, sustained by a tsunami of public money that each year surpasses the military spending of the rest of the world – naturally respond with “asymmetrical” operations. At first, these were directed at nearby targets: supply lines, the local proxies and allies wiling to grow their bank accounts, and other chaos-inducing depredations in the groups’ own regions, designed to foul the lines of your control and drive out. Just as naturally, USA uses these attacks to justify an even greater military presence in their regions, deliberately fomenting terrorist attacks in order to pursue its political and military agendas. The cycle inevitably, inexorably ratchets upwards and outwards so it whips the herd back into a martial frenzy, keeps the Long War going, and push aside the rabble’s petty, small-minded desires for a peaceful, prosperous life at home, minding their own business and the scenario comes in handy whenever the hankers need to add a little oil-laden real estate or a new military base to the Empire’s burgeoning portfolio.
When P2OG is the executor of USA ‘s interference in other sovereign countries and this force is used in killings of that country’s civilians who is the one in duty to STOP it?Maybe the UN ?Or is there another ?Who will stop the PREDATOR ?
sabinachiaburu 