Joint Chiefs of Staff Official – US Military Gave Intel to Assad, While CIA Funded & Armed ISIS

By Jay Syrmopoulos

Washington, DC – The Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) have been indirectly providing intelligence on the Islamic State to the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, in direct contrast to the Obama administration’s agenda of regime change, in an effort to stop Syria from becoming another failed state from which terrorists can operate.

A recent investigation by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh provides clear evidence of a massive disconnect between President Obama’s White House and the U.S. military regarding the handling of the Syrian situation.

The awkward situation stems from the Obama administration’s insistence that there are “moderate rebel” groups to arm that are capable of defeating Assad, and the subsequent decision to provide weapons to these jihadist groups through a covert CIA program.

In spite of the “Assad must go” pledge made by President Obama and covert CIA program, the U.S. JCS instead opted to feed intelligence on the Islamic State to the Syrian government through a number of intermediary governments, the unidentified former senior advisor to the JCS told Hersh.

“Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,” the former JCS adviser told Hersh.

“The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy,” the unnamed JCS advisor said.

According to a report by Hersh, published in The London Review of Books:

The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

The impetus behind the military’s action was a highly classified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, which made clear that if Assad were to be deposed, Syria would fall into chaos and provide an easy target for Islamic extremists to gain a strong foothold similar to Libya.

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