Senator, Pentagon Unit: U.S. Helped Al Qaeda, Predicted ISIS

A Republican presidential contender is talking up U.S. complicity in the rise of Al Qaeda and its more radical successor ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

“ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately,” U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky (shown in a photo) alleged during an interview on MSNBC. “And most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS. These hawks also wanted to bomb [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad], which would have made ISIS’s job even easier,” he continued. “They created these people. ISIS is all over Libya because these same hawks in my party loved — they loved [former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya. They just wanted more of it.”

Separately, a 2012 memo released by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) suggests that the federal government at a minimum predicted that a group such as ISIS would arise in the Middle East.

Some critics go farther and argue that the memo suggests a sinister secret plan by a well-positioned authorities to create chaos in the Middle East by fostering ISIS. Why? To foster hidden foreign policy goals such as toppling Assad, hurting Iran, relieving threats to Israel, opening the way for a Qatar gas pipeline to Europe, and increasing U.S. arms sales and other military goals.

Meanwhile, former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell said he did not know who U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona was meeting in the adjoining photo, taken when McCain traveled to Syria in 2013. Morell was responding to question by the Justice Integrity Project at his news conference May 11 to to promote his memoir The Great War of Our Time, which analyzes the war against Islamic militants.

McCain, now chairman of the U.S. Armed Services Committee, was seeking then and now to boost U.S. military support for those opposing Assad’s government. McCain has denied that he met ISIS leaders, as alleged by critics who have published the collage at right claiming that the man circled in red would become the top ISIS leader, “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.  

Morell is a 33-year veteran of the CIA who retired in 2013 after serving as deputy director and twice holding the temporary post of director. He is urrently the senior intelligence analyst at CBS News among other his other pursuits. He is shown at right in our photo from the session.

The public is left clueless when someone of his credentials punts on a tough question, as he did several times in his news conference broadcast by C-SPAN.

To help other researchers penetrate such mysteries, I am scheduled to speak this weekend on two panels at The Left Forum May 31 at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice at 524 W. 59 St. in Manhattan. Each panel uses history to illuminate the range of possibilities in current affairs.

• The first is: Legal Solutions To JFK Assassination Research at noon. 
• The second at 3:40 p.m. is: Deep Politics, with my segment Making Deep Politics Work For You On Today’s Issues.

For example, the near-certainty of informed researchers (reflected also in public opinion polls) that the Warren Commission performed a cover-up of the full facts of President Kennedy’s murder illuminates the dangerous possibilities within current disputes.

Attendees are primarily those with left and academic perspectives. Yet our project’s research is non-partisan and prompts at least as many invitations from conservative broadcasters and audiences as from the left because every citizen needs better tools these days to understand the confusion widely disseminated on the biggest national issues.

For such reasons, this column continues is overview of current mysteries by quoting sources from the right, left and center below.